Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators v. 2

*********************************************************************

Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators v.2

CIESIN and its Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) are pleased to announce the availability of the Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators (ENTRI) service, an on-line tool that integrates data about the content and status of international environmental treaties with data about national resource indicators, i.e. national-scale socioeconomic, environmental, and earth science variables (including data derived from remote sensing). ENTRI is a substantially upgraded successor to the prototype Policy Instruments Database (PIDB), which has been operational since August 1995.

The WWW Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for ENTRI is: http://sedac.ciesin.org/entri/

We've added the following enhancements and new features to this release of ENTRI:

* the complete set of national resource indicators used in the World Resource Institute's World Resources 1996-1997 (145 additional variables for all nations of the world);

* an on-line thematic guide that discusses how environmental treaties and national resource indicators, including remotely sensed data, can be used to help understand key issues related to the human dimensions of global environmental change;

* a Harvest broker which enables users to conduct free-text search of a "virtual collection" of environmental treaties residing not just at CIESIN, but throughout the Internet;

* treaty texts collected by the British Columbia Ministry of Environment, Land, and Parks for its "Pollution Prevention Compendium", including bi-lateral environmental agreements between the US and Canada plus a number of significant environmental declarations by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD);

* e-mail-only access to environmental treaty and resource indicator resources on the WWW via CIESIN's www.mail service (for users without convenient access to WWW browsers); and

* updated treaty status data from the World Conservation Union (IUCN).

ENTRI enables Internet users to answer "basic questions" such as:

"Which treaties are in force for a given state?"

"What is the text of a given treaty?".

"What are the values of national resource indicators related to a given issue and a given state?"

"What are the values of selected national resource indicators for all states that are (or are not) parties to a particular treaty at a given time?"

Getting the answers to such questions might have taken hours or days of research using traditional methods. Now, users can get their answers in seconds or minutes over the Internet. In many cases they can also link directly to the international bodies responsible for overseeing the treaties and to other related information resources.

The environmental treaties and national resource indicators included here cover nine global environmental issues: global climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, transboundary air pollution, desertification and drought, conservation of biological diversity, deforestation, oceans and their living resources, trade and the environment, and population.

ENTRI is a cooperative venture--a multi-organizational framework for sharing and integrating data--that depends upon the active participation of a number of organizations, each leaders in their own mission areas:

* The World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), partners in CIESIN's Information Cooperative, have shared information resources that they have developed to track the status and content of international treaties related to the environment;

* Freedom House has provided socioeconomic and political data;

* the Multilaterals Project at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy has provided some digitized treaty texts;

* the World Resources Institute (also a partner in the Information Cooperative program) provided data from its authoritative publication, World Resources 1996-1997;

* the British Columbia Ministry of Environment, Land, and Parks has contributed its "Pollution Prevention Compendium" of treaty texts; and

* the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has funded the data integration and the development of the data access system through SEDAC, which is one of nine data centers in NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System.

You will need a forms-capable WWW browser to take full advantage of the database's relational search capabilities. Alternately, if you have telnet access to the Internet you may telnet to infoserver.ciesin.org and log in as "lynx" to use a character-oriented WWW browser. If you have only e-mail access to the Internet, you can access some of ENTRI's capabilities by using CIESIN's www.mail service, an e-mail-only gateway to the WWW.

For more information, please make contact with CIESIN User Services by e-mail to entri@ciesin.org or by telephone to 517/797-2727.

This service is provided by the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) under contract to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for the creation and operation of the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). SEDAC is one of the data centers in NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS). SEDAC's mission is to develop and deliver information products and services that integrate social and natural science data in ways useful for decision making.

CIESIN is a registered trademark of the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network.

BACK TO *********************************************************************