In general, a well-designed national environmental reporting system has the following broad objectives:

• to regularly provide the public, local government and decision makers with accurate, timely and accessible information about the condition of and prospects for the country’s environment;
• to increase public understanding of the national environment, its condition and prospects;
• to facilitate the development of, and review and report on, an agreed set of national environmental indicators;
• to provide an early warning of potential problems;
• to report on the effectiveness of policies and programs designed to respond to environmental change, including progress towards achieving environmental standards and targets;
• to contribute to the assessment of the country's progress towards achieving ecological sustainability;
• to contribute to the assessment of the country's progress in protecting biological diversity and maintaining ecological processes and systems;
• to create a mechanism for integrating environmental information with social and economic information, thus providing a basis for incorporating environmental considerations in the development of long-term, ecologically sustainable economic and social policies;
• to identify gaps in the country's knowledge of environmental conditions and trends and recommend strategies for research and monitoring to fill these gaps;
• to fulfil the country's international environmental reporting obligations;
• to help decision makers to make informed judgments about the broad environmental consequences of social, economic and environmental policies and plans.

Most countries engaged in regular state-of-the environment reporting tend to adopt the OECD's pressure-state-response approach to state of the environment reporting. Reports will examine the environmental pressures resulting from energy production and use, population change, urban growth and international trade, and from activities in major economic sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing and transport. They will also examine the state produced by these pressures on atmospheric, terrestrial, inland aquatic, marine and urban environments and report on responses, such as policy initiatives, legislative reform and changes in public behaviour. Such reports are based on an integrated environmental assessment as defined in Box 1 below. Furthermore, some reports may examine specific thematic issues covering the areas of water, air/climate, biodiversity, wastes, land degradation, etc.

The frequency of reporting will vary depending on the coverage from both geographic and thematic perspectives. The Aarhus Convention recommends that signatories to that convention should publish national SOE reports every 3-4 years. State, district or city level reports may be published on an irregular basis. Thematic assessments in areas such as groundwater, biodiversity, climate, etc may be linked to MEAs that have their own reporting cycles. UNEP is currently developing a web-based system called PEARL (Prototype Environmental Assessment and Reporting Landscape) to ‘map the assessment landscape’ and a beta version of the system is available at this link www.unep.org/pearl.

PEARL (Prototype Environmental Assessment and Reporting Landscape)

UNEP’s mandate and role is keeping the global environmental situation under review

One of UNEP’s main functions since its inception at the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 is to keep under review the world environmental situation, as mandated by UN General Assembly resolution 2997 (XXVII). The objective being to ensure that emerging environmental problems of wide international significance receive appropriate and adequate considerations by Governments. Human-induced environmental change has accelerated over the last three decades, as is clearly illustrated in UNEP’s flagship Global Environment Outlook (GEO) series of reports and other assessments such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment(2005). The increasing complexity of environmental degradation now requires an enhanced capacity for scientific assessment, monitoring and early warning. For this reason UNEP’s Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum (GC/GMEF) has initiated a consultative process to identify gaps and needs in the current assessment structure, and the means to address them. UNEP is now in the process of developing Environment Watch as a holistic, coherent and distributed system for watching the global environment based on international cooperation.

Human activities are increasingly contributing to environmental change, which affects the ability of the environment to provide goods and services in support of human well-being and development. The poor are disproportionately impacted by such environmental change. It is therefore critically important for humanity to watch the environment in a systematic way in order to be able to adequately and effectively mitigate or adapt to environmental change. Environmental information and data are, however, often scattered and inadequate. This is hampering progress towards environmental management, including implementation of multilateral environmental agreements and internationally agreed goals and targets for sustainable development.

The human-environment interaction analytical approach is built on the driver, pressure, state, impact and response (DPSIR) framework shown in the figure below. It is multi-scalable and indicates generic cause-and-effect relations within and among:

• Drivers: Sometimes referred to as indirect or underlying drivers or driving forces, they refer to fundamental processes in society which drives activities having a direct impact on the environment.
• Pressures: Sometimes referred to as direct drivers, include the social and economic sectors of society (also sometimes considered as drivers). Human interventions may be directed towards causing a desired environmental change and may be subject to feedback in terms of environmental change, or could be intentional or unintentional byproducts of other human activities (i.e., pollution).
• State: Environmental state also includes trends, often referred to as environmental change, which could be both natural and human induced. One form of change, such as climate change, may lead to other forms of change such as biodiversity loss (a secondary effect of greenhouse gas emissions). Multiple pressures could leave the environment more vulnerable, leading to cumulative change and, in some cases, sudden and disruptive change.
• Impacts: Environmental change may positively or negatively influence human well-being (as reflected in international goals and targets) through changes in ecological services and environmental stress. Impacts may be environmental, social and economic, and contribute to the vulnerability of people. Vulnerability to change varies between groups of people depending on their geographic, economic and social circumstances, exposure to change and capacity to mitigate or adapt to change. Human well being, vulnerability and coping capacity are dependent on access to social and economic goods – and services and exposure to social and economic stress.
• Responses: Responses consist of elements among the drivers, pressures and impacts which may be used for managing society in order to alter human/environment interactions. Drivers, pressures and impacts that can be altered by a decision maker at a given scale are referred to as endogenous factors, while those that cannot are referred to as exogenous factors. Responses are at different levels: for example, environmental laws and institutions at the national level, and multilateral environmental agreements and institutions at the regional and international levels. Responses address issues of vulnerability of both people and the environment, and provide opportunities for enhancing human well-being.