Partnerships and Networks

Ecoterm is a sub-group under the Ecoinformatics partnership and is led by UNEP. The first meeting of the group was convened by UNEP at International Environment House, Geneva. A total of 48 participants attended. These were drawn for four main sectors – Government, Intergovernmental Organisations (incl five UN agencies), scientific and research institutions and the corporate sector, spread over four regions (Africa, Asia/Pacific, Europe and North America). The primary purpose of the workshop was to bring together the major providers of environmental terminologies to discuss the status of their terminologies, how they are applying new technologies, and how these resources can be “integrated” using new technologies.

A total of thirty presentations were made by participants which gave a very good overview of existing initiatives worldwide related to knowledge organizations systems involving environmental ontologies, thesauri and terminologies including both pilot web services development and multilingual perspectives. Of particular interest was the ongoing development of the Semantic Web being led by the W3C consortium at MIT.

The group was named Ecoterm and will have a close working relationship with the Best Practices Working Group under the Semantic Web Activity of W3C. This, in effect, links Ecoterm with the W3C’s cutting edge work on research and development of new web technologies. A draft workplan for cooperation among stakeholders was compiled.

The UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters was adopted on 25th June 1998 in the Danish city of Aarhus at the Fourth Ministerial Conference in the 'Environment for Europe' process. Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration provided the seed for the Convention.
The first meeting of the Parties to the Aarhus Convention established a new task force to facilitate the implementation of the Convention by preparing draft recommendations on the more effective use of electronic information tools to provide public access to environmental information.

The new task force is expected to further develop the work of a task force established under the second meeting of the Signatories on the basis of a working paper prepared jointly by the European Eco Forum, Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC) and UNEP-INFOTERRA (CEP/WG.5/2000/11- see below). The task force, under the leadership of Austria and with the support of Norway, held a workshop on electronic tools in Arendal, Norway on 8-9 March 2001. The event was also streamed via the Internet by the organizers, UNEP/GRID-Arendal (www.grida.no).
The main results of the activities organised under the auspices of the previous task force were a list of possible actions to further the use of electronic tools in the implementation and promotion of the Convention and a compendium of good practice examples and priorities prepared by the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC) (for more information, see www.rec.org/e-aarhus. The new task force will continue to examine good practice examples in this field and further explore the mechanisms for dissemination of environmental information to the public in electronic form.