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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
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
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.
Helping cities inform citizens
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:
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.