Annual Report 2001

23 UNEP/GRID-Arendal | Annual Report 2001 | | Section 2 | GRID-Arendal in review

Strengthening institutions and information systems A major role for GRID-Arendal is to help our partners strengthen their capacity to produce and distribute environmental information. We help strengthen and support environmental reporting in Norway, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Building capacities in countries and regions

Helping cities inform citizens

We supported the production of environmental information in Central and Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States under the Environment and Natural Resources Information Networks Programme (ENRIN). ENRIN's role is to enhance the capacities of national institutions in developing countries and countries with economies in transition. In 2001 we helped Estonia, Albania, Romania, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Uzbekistan in producing user-friendly State of the Environment ( SoE ) reports, all of which are available on the Internet at www.grida.no/enrin. Technical and managerial support has been given to the production of SoE reports in China and South Africa. In South Africa, SoE reports are produced both for the country as a whole and for different provinces. In both countries the support has developed into the establishment of UNEP-compatible national environmental information centres. Work has commenced for Africa as a whole through the development of a new UNEP Programme to strengthen the capacity of African countries in environmental information management and in providing support to national, regional and global environmental assessments.

A well-known product is our Cities Environment Reports on the Internet (CEROI), which we expanded in 2001 to include cities as different as Geneva in Switzerland to Dushanbe in Tajikistan. CEROI is a programme, which helps cities put their environmental information on-line, with the help of a user-friendly reporting software. The end product shows the actual environmental situation in the city, the causes and consequences of that situation, as well as what action has been taken. GRID-Arendal provides technical, methodological and fundraising support. CEROI now consists of cities on the continents Africa, Europe and Asia, and we expect more to come in 2002 with the planned addition of Latin America and the Caribbean. We also worked closely with the European Environment Agency (EEA) to adapt CEROI tools to European needs and European common indicators. Several of the European cities will be published on CEROI in 2002. For more information go to: www.ceroi.net

More State of the Environment reports have been added to the CEROI web page in 2001. Here cities report on e.g. access to clean drinking water; what is the level of air emissions; and what has and will be done about these issues. By filling in the same indicators, every country, city and municipality will be able to tell the public about the state of the environment, and compare data and solutions.