Today, across our country, our region, and the globe we face many common, serious environmental issues such as climate change, adequate access to adequate clean, fresh water, threats to biodiversity and other issues. We all need good, accurate, and timely information to both understand the world around us, and to support our decisions and policies about how to best manage and conserve our natural resources. All these issues are heavily interrelated with other economic and social concerns, therefore we need a common basis for sharing knowledge and information, and in working together in more coordinated ways across all sectors of society.
In our region and in all other parts of the world, there are hundreds of existing initiatives and programs aimed at sharing environmental information. Many of these “information federations” are organized around a province, a country, a region, or other geographic area while others focus on thematic topics, like water, biodiversity, or air quality, and some combine both. There is a huge cumulative investment in collecting environmental and related data across the world, and today there is more information available than has ever been the case in history, but we still have challenges in managing, finding and sharing this information with each other.
Eight years ago in this very location, the United Arab Emirates, in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) launched an initiative called the Abu Dhabi Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI) with the intention of closing the environmental information gap between developed and developing countries. AGEDI was subsequently announced at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in 2002 as a Type II WSSD partnership initiative. Since that time and with the help of UNEP and other partners we have made good progress at the local and regional levels. Now in the third phase of development we are branching out to a stronger focus on the region and our ties globally and we are facing the same information, data and knowledge sharing challenges as everyone. To address this, the UAE in cooperation with our partners at UNEP, the European Environment Agency, and others is now convening an ‘Eye on Earth’ Global Summit to be held in Abu Dhabi on 15-17 November , 2010.
The Summit will bring together high-level policy-makers, decision-makers and technical specialists from the international community, as well as governmental and non-governmental sectors with the aim of setting in motion a global process that will:
- Strengthen, synergise, and extend a global process to provide quality and timely information for decision-making on a common framework
- Reinforce multilateral policies and institutional arrangements to interlink environmental and environment-related information systems and networks
- Support technical cooperation to accelerate the building of an integrated global environmental information infrastructure
- Accelerate capacity building and technology support programmes around the world to further close the gap between developed and developing nations
- Establish a global fund to support developing countries.
The UAE Government, together with its partners, invites Governments, Non-Governmental Organizations, UN agencies, the private sector and other major players in the international environmental arena to support the initiative and work collectively towards bridging the global environmental knowledge gap. More information about this initiative was presented today at a special side event “Access to Environmental Information and the Eye on Earth initiative.”
We encourage all interested parties to participate in the Summit, and we look forward to greeting you in Abu Dhabi in November.