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CIESIN/SEDAC Policy Instruments On-Line





International Environmental Agreements On-line

CIESIN and its Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) are
pleased to announce the availability of the prototype Policy Instruments
Database (PIDB), an on-line tool for browsing and searching of text,
summaries, and status of treaties and other international agreements
related to global environmental change and sustainable development.

The WWW Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for the PIDB is:

 http://sedac.ciesin.org/pidb/pidb-home.html

The PIDB allows users on the Internet with a WWW browser or telnet
access to ask basic questions about environmental treaties such as
"Which treaties are in force for a given country?"; "Which treaties had
entered into force by a given date?"; and "What is the text of a given
treaty?"  Getting the answers to such questions might have taken hours
or days of research using traditional methods. Now, users can  get their
answers in seconds or minutes over the Internet.  In many cases they can
also link directly to the international bodies responsible for
overseeing the treaties and to other related information resources.

"Policy instruments" are broadly defined to include legal documents such
as treaties, agreements, and laws; information on the negotiation,
structure, and status of these legal instruments; and directives,
initiatives, and statements from government agencies and
non-governmental organizations.  The policy instruments included here
cover nine global environmental issues: global climate change,
stratospheric ozone depletion, transboundary air pollution,
desertification and drought, conservation of biological diversity,
deforestation, oceans and their living resources, trade and the
environment, and population.  This initial version of the database
includes the full text of 120 international environmental treaties and
information on important dates and actions.

The PIDB was developed as a proof of concept and should be considered
highly developmental.  As with every developmental technology project,
there are known problems that we are working to remedy.  However, we
have now reached a stage where we will feel we will benefit from
feedback from a wider variety of external users.

The Policy Instruments Database is a cooperative venture that would not
have been possible without the participation of several different
organizations that have each made significant prior investments in
developing relevant capabilities.  The World Conservation Union (IUCN)
and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), partners in
CIESIN's Information Cooperative, shared information resources that they
have developed to track the status and content of international treaties
related to the environment; Freedom House provided socioeconomic and
political data; the Multilaterals Project at the Fletcher School of Law
and Diplomacy provided some digitized treaty texts; and the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) funded the data integration
and the development of the data access system through SEDAC, which is
one of nine data centers in NASA's Earth Observing System Data and
Information System.

You will need a forms-capable WWW browser like Netscape or Mosaic 2.00
to take full advantage of the database's relational search capabilities.
Alternately, if  you have telnet access to the Internet you may telnet
to infoserver.ciesin.org and log in as "lynx" to use a
character-oriented WWW browser.   Although we cannot currently provide
e-mail access to the PIDB's Web resources, we do hope to be able to
offer (or point to) such a service in the future.  

To learn more about  the PIDB, please contact CIESIN by e-mail to
pidb@ciesin.org, or call CIESIN user services at 517/797-2727.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Frederick Zimmerman
Research Scientist, Environmental Research Institute of Michigan
Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)
4251 Plymouth Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48105 
Phone: 313/741-4657 | Fax: 313/663-6622
e-mail: fzimmerm@ciesin.org | WWW URL: http://sedac.ciesin.org/