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Environmental Information
Communications
Capacity Building
Baltic Sea region maps
The 'evergreen' among GRID-Arendal's on-line environmental
information sites, the Baltic Sea Region GIS, Maps and
Statistical Database, continued to excel as the most popular
site in 1999. The web site features spatial information on
the transboundary Baltic Sea region. It includes GIS data,
maps in various graphic formats, statistical tables and docu-
ments. In 1999 all the maps were converted and made
available in the Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf),
which immediately became the most popular format. In co-
operation with the Uppsala University and the Royal Insti-
tute of Technology, both in Sweden, a prototype interactive
web GIS application was developed based on the GIS data.
Monitoring Baltic Agenda 21 goals for
sustainable development
GRID-Arendal is working with the Baltic 21 secretariat to
set up a system for providing data for a core set of indica-
tors to monitor the Baltic Agenda 21 goals for sustainable
development in the Baltic Sea region. The indicator set
was approved by the Baltic 21 Senior Official Group at a
meeting in Berlin in March, and will be presented to envir-
onment and sector ministers in June 2000.
Arendal
UNEPnet
dish
Baltic Sea Region
GIS, Maps and Statistical Database
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Baltic
Agenda 21
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Northwest Russia and Belarus
The implementation of the first phase of a multi-year pro-
ject on
"Environment and Sustainable Development Infor-
mation Management and Reporting for the Northwestern
Regions of Russia and Belarus"
started. As part of this,
discussions were held between GRID-Arendal and repre-
sentatives of the Russian State Committee on the Environ-
ment. Workshops will be an important part of this process.
The GRID-Arendal Gateway
GRID-Arendal's importance as a gateway for all types of
telecommunications traffic out of UNEP-HQ has increased.
Through the link from Nairobi to Arendal, Internet traffic is
reliably delivered into the World Wide Web for services
such as e-mail, WEB-browsing and file transfer. The Aren-
dal gateway provides UNEP with world-class services, as
well as substantially reduced telecommunications costs.
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