In 1972, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm called for an international mechanism to facilitate the exchange of scientific and technical information on the environment. UNEP responded by establishing the International Referral System in 1977, later renamed INFOTERRA, the Environmental Information System.
What Products and Services does INFOTERRA offer?
Currently, INFOTERRA responds to more than 38,500 queries per year. Detailed and tailored responses are provided to queries in various forms, including bibliographic references and abstracts, documents, articles, technical reports, lists of consultants and database printouts. Adaptation of communications technology using satellite, fax, electronic mail and computers with vastly increased data handling capabilities has, and will, greatly increase both quantity and quality of information processed.
Examples of queries that were processed by INFOTERRA are:
Environmental impact of development of hot springs (Malaysia);
Process description of tannery waste water treatment (Syria);
International air quality emissions (USA);
Establishing a seed bank of endangered species (Argentina);
Enforcement of environmental legislation on fresh water and water pollution in Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia (Finland);
Planning landfills for industrial and solid waste (Pakistan);
Integrated cleaner production concepts, information for university courses (AGFUND);
Environmental impact of a large hydroelectric dam (Cuba);
Acid rain and its effects on transpiration of plants (France);
Practical low-cost methods for production and treatment of municipal drinking water, including monitoring and waste water control (Guinea);
National and international organizations dealing with automatic lines for treatment of urban wastes (Uzbekistan);
Technologies for cleaning soil and water polluted by accidents of oil and petrochemical products (Romania).
Information needed to address most sustainable development problems is already available somewhere in the world. The development of companion relationships between network users, especially between developed and developing countries, has proved a further means of providing information to decision-makers, resulting in well-informed and timely decision making.
The first such companionship has established with the Southern African Sub-regional INFOTERRA Network (SASIN). With generous assistance from the NFPs (national focal points) of the USA and Ireland, the countries of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe are being provided with equipment, training and assistance to develop a common bibliographic system for their environmental library collections and document exchange through which they will share promotional materials and regional environmental information sources.
How does INFOTERRA work?
INFOTERRA is an element of the Environment Assessment Division of UNEP and operates within the framework of program element 5.4 "Environmental Information Services."
INFOTERRA operates through a network of 170 national focal points (NFPs), designated by governments and linked to the INFOTERRA Program Activity Center (PAC) in Nairobi. The PAC coordinates activities and provides network support through analysis of user needs and development of subject and source profiles to improve national, regional and global information services. The network is linked to approximately 6,800 national and international institutions and experts from organizations recognized as leaders in their field. In addition, INFOTERRA has identified 34 centers of excellence which provide highly specialized scientific responses to users' queries covering a range of environmental priority areas.
