This section of the country profile is aimed at the user who is an environmental scientist or specialist with expertise and interest in a particular area of the environment. Environmental specialists protect and preserve the well-being of the environment and human health. The specialist may have a thematic focus in a particular area such as air, water, land, disasters, biodiversity and so on. Alternatively, the specialist may have a cross-cutting focus across many thematic areas but may specialize in law or policy-making, integrated assessment or environmental management.

In general, the environmental scientist will have the skills needed to:

• evaluate physical, chemical and ecological components of the environment;
• identify environmental problems;
• conduct integrated and thematic environmental assessments;
• construct models of ecological processes;
• undertake risk analyses;
• assess environmental impacts;
• design and implement experiments and monitoring programs;
• undertake quantitative analysis of environmental data;
• advise on the formulation of environmental policy;
• solutions for environmental problems.

The objective is to provide the user with a wide range of environmental information relevant to the thematic area of interest, and pertaining to a particular country. The Aarhus Convention provides a comprehensive definition of environmental information, which is very broad - ranging from scientific and technical information about media (air, water, etc) to policy-oriented information dealing with law, strategies and programmes.

In general, the term ‘environment’ is complex and covers a multiplicity of themes, which themselves are comprised of sub-themes and narrower terms. Different issues such as long-range transport of air pollutants or loss of biodiversity can be classified under broader themes. For example, under the atmosphere theme, the major issues are air quality, ozone depletion and the enhanced greenhouse effect.

Different general environmental thesauri such as ENVOC, GEMET or EARTh take different conceptual approaches towards classifying the environment, and no single general thesaurus can cover the whole environment in considerable depth so specialized thesauri are often needed to provide greater specificity.The Ecoterm project is working towards building a simple knowledge organization system (SKOS) to link environmental terminologies.

To simplify the presentation of information in this section of the country profile, a total of ten overarching themes are used:

• Atmosphere
• Disasters
• Forests
• Land
• Biodiversity
• Coastal and marine
• Freshwater
• Human settlements and urban
• Socio-Economic
• Natural and cultural heritage

Within each theme the information is classified by:

• issues
• law and policy (strategies, plans, programmes, etc)
• institutions (governmental and non-governmental)
• assessment reports
• indicators
• datasets
• maps
• environmental research studies
• environmental management (best practice, awareness raising, etc)

In addition, countries that are involved in regional and global reporting initiatives, may present their thematic information under the relevant initiatives as appropriate.