The purpose of a state-of-the-environment reporting framework is to allow for regular reporting on an agreed set of country-relevant environmental issues from both an integrated and thematic perspective and across different geographic scales from national down to local. The state of the environment (SOE) reports will normally be supported by a set of indicators that show changes and trends in environmental conditions, in much the same way as well-accepted economic indicators are used to report on the state of the economy. Obviously, the indicators have to be based on available data so indicators in a city SOE report would be based on city-level data whereas national indicators would be based on national data aggregated from sub-national sources and related reporting processes.

The SOE reports will also identify the implications of current activities and resource uses for future environmental conditions and their associated social and economic costs. The reporting system will enable decision-makers at the relevant level to act in the long-term interests of the environment to pursue the goal of ecologically sustainable development for present and future generations.

In many countries the national environmental authority is responsible for overseeing SOE reporting processes but it is also common to have other ministries, agencies and state-level authorities involved in parallel reporting processes. These various processes may have different mandates; time scales, and geographic and thematic coverage.

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 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)

The conceptual model used in PEARL is a hierarchical one (see Fig. 1) whereby a lead institution (or institutions) is responsible for driving and managing an overall assessment process which in turn is comprised of one or more sub-processes under which individual assessments are undertaken, ultimately producing various published outputs. Published outputs are usually the main assessment report and a number of related reports such as executive summaries, technical studies, data compendia and policy-relevant findings.

Fig. 1 Conceptual (hierarchical) model for mapping the assessment landscape

Four different metadata forms capture the essential data with respect to the assessment processes, sub-processes, individual assessments and published outputs. The browse function allows the user to view and examine the assessment landscape under any given top-level assessment process.

For example, the national-level assessment landscape for a given country will resemble the hierarchical tree shown in Fig. 2 below.

Fig. 2 Generic processes in the typical national assessment landscape

At this point in time it is not possible to display the national assessment landscape for this country. When available, it will be a more elaborate and country-specific manifestation of the above tree diagram.

However, the national and local SOE reports and other relevant assessment outputs already catalogued in PEARL are listed below in reverse chronological order and the report titles are hyper-linked to the underlying metadata. Full text, where available, will be provided in due course.