THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT
M O N I T O R I N G S Y S T E M (GEMS):
SOME RECENT D E V E L O P M E N T S M. D. G W Y N N E United Nations Environment Programme, P.O. Box 30552, Nairobi, Kenya
Abstract. GEMS is an established, operational fact, a fact that has been with us for ten years. In 1975, following the instructions of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, UNEP moved into the field of environmental monitoring by establishing at its Nalrobi Headquaters a Programme Activity Centre for GEMS. The role given to this Programme Activity Centre is to co-ordinate the disparate international monitoring activities that are conducted thoughout the world, particulary within the UN system, and to advise the Environment Fund of UNEP on how best to support and stimulate the initiation of new activities or the expansion of ongoing ones through the allocation of financial resources to these activities. The data gathered within the GEMS networks are used for assessment of the state of the environment and its trends, for better, more rational management of the environment and its natural resources. Ten years after it began the United Nations GEMS effort can be seen to be both fully operational and global in scope.
The Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS) is a collective effort of the world community to acquire the information needed to investigate environmental processes through monitoring, and thus to understand and manage the environment and to prevent its degradation. This much is often said but many people do not realize that GEMS is not just an idea. It is an established, operational fact, a fact, moreover, that has been with us for ten years. In May 1985 at the twelfth session of the UNEP Governing Council in Nairobi, GEMS officially celebrated its tenth anniversary in an impressive, unique special occasion at which Soviet cosmonaut Anatoli Berezovoi and American astronaut George Nelson shared the same platform to describe their views and feelings on seeing our planet in its entirety from space. Anatoli Berezovoi you will remeber spent over seven months in space while George Nelson was one of the first to fly untethered away from the mother ship thus becoming a free satellite of earth in his own right. Both men painted vivid and moving pictures of the earth including descriptions of forest clearings, ocean dumping of waste, dust clouds over the ocean, and vast industrial emission plumes. Both men came back convinced that we had to have a proper understanding of what is happening to the environment of our planet before it is too late. GEMS helps to obtain this understanding. It was in 1975, following the instruction of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, that UNEP moved into the field of environmental monitoring by establishing at its Nairobi Headquarters a Programme Activity Centre for GEMS. The role given to this Programme Activity Centre by Governments is to co-ordinate the disparate international monitoring and assessment activities that are conducted throughout the world, particularly within the UN system, and to advise the Environment Fund of UNEP on how best to support and stimulate the initiation of new Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 11: 219-223, 1988. 9 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
220
M. D. GWYNNE
activities and the expansion of ongoing ones through the allocation of financial resources to these activities. As I have pointed out in my introductory statement to this meeting, UNEP is not an executing agency. It is rather a co-ordinating body that works through the Specialized Agencies of the United Nations and other relevant international organizations to bring their collective expertise to bear on particular environmental problems and actions. Global environment monitoring is no exception to this approach so that today within GEMS, and supported in part by the Environment Fund, there are some 22 global monitoring networks and activities. The names of some of these GEMS networks are already well known to you though I think that few here will realize that they are components of the Global Environment Monitoring System - the WMO Background Air Pollution Monitoring Network (BAPMoN) and the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) are examples of two such GEMS networks. Others include the UNESCO/WMO World Glacier Inventory, and the various conservation monitoring activities carried out through the IUCN Conservation Monitoring Centre. The philosophy underlying the development of GEMS is that there are many important variables and sets of variables that need to be monitored if we are to build up a realistic picture of the state of the environment and its trends. Ideally, all these variables should be measured at a series of similar linked monitoring stations - the principle behind integrated or multi-media monitoring. In practice, however, this proved very difficult since, in the early days, there was no agreement on the strategy to be used and the methods to be followed. Consequently, it was decided to create a GEMS that was made up of a number of separate monitoring layers, each layer consisting of a particular global network that monitored several associated variables. When considered together these layers would make up a total Global Environment Monitoring System. This strategy allowed us to start GEMS almost immediately. Thus today in many GEMS networks we have some ten years of monitoring data that we might not have had otherwise. Over time, it was expected that the extent and quality of the networks would improve and increase, so that related monitoring layers could gradually be brought together thus creating better monitoring networks and allowing more meaningful data relationships to be developed. This has begun to happen. For example, the various GEMS pollutant monitoring networks that relate to human and ecosystem health are gradually being brought together into a single programme - termed Human Exposure Assessment Locations or HEALs. Initially, this programme will look at the total exposure risk of different sectors of the population (e.g. pregnant women) in selected cities worldwide, to pollutants reaching targets through the media covered by the health-related monitoring networks (water, air, food). Similarly, GEMS integrated background monitoring projects have already been started in North and South America through WMO and UNESCO, and in conjunction with national agencies in Chile and the United States. Since this relates to BAPMoN, links in this direction will be strengthened. Hopefully, these projects can later be joined with similar integrated monitoring projects now being started within CMEA. Again
THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT MONITORING SYSTEM (GEMS): SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
221
we are working with ECE on the development of methods to adequately survey the type and extent of the various forms of forest damage from acidic deposition. This obviously relates to BAPMoN, to work with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on forest monitoring and assessment, and to the GEMS Ecological Monitoring Unit approach to the inventory and monitoring of the renewable natural resources of arid and semi-arid areas. And so the layers begin to join up. There is no need before this gathering to describe in detail all the 22 GEMS monitoring networks. Most were in any case outlined in a paper presented to the first symposium in this series held in Riga. Since that time the networks have, of course, considerably expanded in geographical coverage, content and data quality. Suffice it to say that there are five interrelated GEMS programme areas each containing several global networks. The programme areas are health-related monitoring (which deals with pollutants and their effects), climate-related monitoring, the long range transport of airborne pollutants, ocean monitoring, and the monitoring of renewable natural resources (forests rangelands, soil degradation, threatened species, and the like). In this the main agencies concerned are the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). This, of course, is by no means an exhaustive or exclusive list. In developing GEMS networks great care is always taken to ensure that the data produced are of the highest quality that it is possible to obtain. Throughout the work of GEMS the emphasis is, and always has been, on data quality rather than data quantity. The main output of these GEMS monitoring networks, therefore, is data that can be compared. Such comparable data can only be obtained through the repeated rounds of intercalibration that are built into all GEMS activities that are co-ordinated through the GEMS Programme Activity Centre in UNEP. To see that the necessary intercalibration excersises are designed, agreed upon, and implemented is one of UNEP's major roles in GEMS. All this can be a lengthy and complex process. To establish GEMS-Water, for example, took close to four years of expert meetings and consultations before the final strategy, methods, and quality assurance procedures were agreed upon. Even now we know that they are far from perfect and can be considerably improved. The review, evaluation and improvement process is something that goes on continuously involving experts from many nations. All UNEP supported GEMS activities also have provisions for training and for technical assistance both of which are to ensure the participation of countries that may be inadequately provided with personnel and equipment. Over the decade of GEMS existance this approach has been very successful and is one of the main reasons why today there are 142 countries that participate in at least one GEMS activity. There is no point in monitoring data for the sake of monitoring. The information gathered must be put to some use. It is a pre-requisite, therefore, that each of the GEMS networks has associated with it a database into which monitored data are
222
M.D.
GWYNNE
placed and from which they can be accessed for analytical and assessment purposes. Any new network being developed, such as that for integrated background monitoring, must, therefore, have an associated database to go with it. Because of the financial limitations under which U N E P works, a feature it has in common with other UN organizations, it was not possible for it to develop and operate these databases with its own resources. Accordingly, some countries offered to run some of the databases either at their own expense or with minimal subsidy. These offers were, naturally, accepted though it was recognized that each database would then tend to develop independently along the lines normal to the host institute. This posed no problems in the early days when the networks were first being established. Later it was realized that the power and usefulness of the data could be increased many times over if the various data sets could be related to each other in a meaningful way. Similarly, the same data sets could also be related to particular environmental problems and to particular areas of the earth. This procedure would make these data sets into an extremely powerful assessment and management tool when focused upon a specific area or resource, particularly when joined with other high quality information drawn from additional outside sources. Computer hardware and software have now reached the stage where the establishment of such relationships through the focussing of data is feasible. The bridge between resource monitoring and resource management, for example, can now be made in a more meaningful and cost effective way. The key to these actions is both the geographical information system approach in which different data planes are related to each other and to a particular point on the earth's surface, and the development of a linked, distributed database system within GEMS. The latter will enable participating organizations to access various relevant data holdings for their own research, development or management purposes. Such a system will also undoubtedly be of great practical benefit to developing countries. At the same time it will help to generate new and better information to put into the GEMS databases thus enabling more reliable global environment assessments to be made. The latter are of particular importance to U N E P because its Governing Council has given it a mandate to be responsible for ensuring the production of a series of assessments of many environmental variables and natural resources. These will draw upon data from each of the main GEMS programme areas and are to be updated at intervals appropriate to the topic concerned - such as every ten years for tropical forest resources, and every twenty years for the world glacier inventory. In consequence, there has now been created within GEMS a geographical information system known as the Global Resource Information Database (GRID). GRID has been made possible by the generous support provided to GEMS for the purpose by a number of interested governments, organizations and industrial concerns. This support has taken the form of direct provision of staff, equipment, software, services, facilities, and support for training (Fellowships, scholarships and the like). Functionally GRID consists at present of two nodes: GRID-Processor in Geneva where most of the data processing and image analysis are carried out; and GRID-
THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT MONITORING SYSTEM (GEMS): SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
223
Control in Nairobi which provides the policy guidance and management direction. Both units can provide the necessary training to potential GRID users. Later other linked GRID nodes will be developed, and discussions are already underway for nodes in the Americas and in Asia. GRID was officially launched by the two spacemen in Nairobi last May (1985); GRID-Processor became functional in August and was officially opened at a small ceremony on September 27th 1985. The first two year pilot phase will carry out global and continental studies, some regional studies, and up to eight national studies. Work has already begun on the input of the various necessary geographical databases, on the development of telecommunication links between nodes and in overcoming the technical problems of linking the various GEMS computer databases. We in UNEP think that this most recent development in GEMS will prove to be a very powerful tool for helping to understand important environmental processes and in making the best possible sustainable use of the renewable natural resources of our planet. In this respect, we are particularly interested in the development of national geographical information system resource databases within developing countries, and will be able to provide guidance to such countries on what systems to install and how to operate them. For some time past, we have been in touch with those who design microcomputers to see whether these machines could be given a geographical information system capability. In this we have been successful and there are now two micro-systems available that can use the ARC/INFO software that is the core of GRID's geographical information system, and the ELAS software that is at the heart of GRID's satellite image analysis system. We envisage such low cost geographical information system capable micro-computers being provided to developing countries to allow them to build up their own national environment and resource databases, and to access directly relevant sections of the distributed GEMS database systems that is the basis of GRID. In these ways we feel that we are taking steps to ensure that maximum use is being made of the data gathered within the GEMS networks for assessment of the state of the environment and its trends, for better understanding of environmental processes, and for better, more rational management of the environment and its natural resources. Thus, ten years after it began the United Nations GEMS effort can be seen to be both fully operational and global in scope.
M O N I T O R I N G S Y S T E M (GEMS):
SOME RECENT D E V E L O P M E N T S M. D. G W Y N N E United Nations Environment Programme, P.O. Box 30552, Nairobi, Kenya
Abstract. GEMS is an established, operational fact, a fact that has been with us for ten years. In 1975, following the instructions of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, UNEP moved into the field of environmental monitoring by establishing at its Nalrobi Headquaters a Programme Activity Centre for GEMS. The role given to this Programme Activity Centre is to co-ordinate the disparate international monitoring activities that are conducted thoughout the world, particulary within the UN system, and to advise the Environment Fund of UNEP on how best to support and stimulate the initiation of new activities or the expansion of ongoing ones through the allocation of financial resources to these activities. The data gathered within the GEMS networks are used for assessment of the state of the environment and its trends, for better, more rational management of the environment and its natural resources. Ten years after it began the United Nations GEMS effort can be seen to be both fully operational and global in scope.
The Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS) is a collective effort of the world community to acquire the information needed to investigate environmental processes through monitoring, and thus to understand and manage the environment and to prevent its degradation. This much is often said but many people do not realize that GEMS is not just an idea. It is an established, operational fact, a fact, moreover, that has been with us for ten years. In May 1985 at the twelfth session of the UNEP Governing Council in Nairobi, GEMS officially celebrated its tenth anniversary in an impressive, unique special occasion at which Soviet cosmonaut Anatoli Berezovoi and American astronaut George Nelson shared the same platform to describe their views and feelings on seeing our planet in its entirety from space. Anatoli Berezovoi you will remeber spent over seven months in space while George Nelson was one of the first to fly untethered away from the mother ship thus becoming a free satellite of earth in his own right. Both men painted vivid and moving pictures of the earth including descriptions of forest clearings, ocean dumping of waste, dust clouds over the ocean, and vast industrial emission plumes. Both men came back convinced that we had to have a proper understanding of what is happening to the environment of our planet before it is too late. GEMS helps to obtain this understanding. It was in 1975, following the instruction of the UN Conference on the Human Environment, that UNEP moved into the field of environmental monitoring by establishing at its Nairobi Headquarters a Programme Activity Centre for GEMS. The role given to this Programme Activity Centre by Governments is to co-ordinate the disparate international monitoring and assessment activities that are conducted throughout the world, particularly within the UN system, and to advise the Environment Fund of UNEP on how best to support and stimulate the initiation of new Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 11: 219-223, 1988. 9 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
220
M. D. GWYNNE
activities and the expansion of ongoing ones through the allocation of financial resources to these activities. As I have pointed out in my introductory statement to this meeting, UNEP is not an executing agency. It is rather a co-ordinating body that works through the Specialized Agencies of the United Nations and other relevant international organizations to bring their collective expertise to bear on particular environmental problems and actions. Global environment monitoring is no exception to this approach so that today within GEMS, and supported in part by the Environment Fund, there are some 22 global monitoring networks and activities. The names of some of these GEMS networks are already well known to you though I think that few here will realize that they are components of the Global Environment Monitoring System - the WMO Background Air Pollution Monitoring Network (BAPMoN) and the European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) are examples of two such GEMS networks. Others include the UNESCO/WMO World Glacier Inventory, and the various conservation monitoring activities carried out through the IUCN Conservation Monitoring Centre. The philosophy underlying the development of GEMS is that there are many important variables and sets of variables that need to be monitored if we are to build up a realistic picture of the state of the environment and its trends. Ideally, all these variables should be measured at a series of similar linked monitoring stations - the principle behind integrated or multi-media monitoring. In practice, however, this proved very difficult since, in the early days, there was no agreement on the strategy to be used and the methods to be followed. Consequently, it was decided to create a GEMS that was made up of a number of separate monitoring layers, each layer consisting of a particular global network that monitored several associated variables. When considered together these layers would make up a total Global Environment Monitoring System. This strategy allowed us to start GEMS almost immediately. Thus today in many GEMS networks we have some ten years of monitoring data that we might not have had otherwise. Over time, it was expected that the extent and quality of the networks would improve and increase, so that related monitoring layers could gradually be brought together thus creating better monitoring networks and allowing more meaningful data relationships to be developed. This has begun to happen. For example, the various GEMS pollutant monitoring networks that relate to human and ecosystem health are gradually being brought together into a single programme - termed Human Exposure Assessment Locations or HEALs. Initially, this programme will look at the total exposure risk of different sectors of the population (e.g. pregnant women) in selected cities worldwide, to pollutants reaching targets through the media covered by the health-related monitoring networks (water, air, food). Similarly, GEMS integrated background monitoring projects have already been started in North and South America through WMO and UNESCO, and in conjunction with national agencies in Chile and the United States. Since this relates to BAPMoN, links in this direction will be strengthened. Hopefully, these projects can later be joined with similar integrated monitoring projects now being started within CMEA. Again
THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT MONITORING SYSTEM (GEMS): SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
221
we are working with ECE on the development of methods to adequately survey the type and extent of the various forms of forest damage from acidic deposition. This obviously relates to BAPMoN, to work with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on forest monitoring and assessment, and to the GEMS Ecological Monitoring Unit approach to the inventory and monitoring of the renewable natural resources of arid and semi-arid areas. And so the layers begin to join up. There is no need before this gathering to describe in detail all the 22 GEMS monitoring networks. Most were in any case outlined in a paper presented to the first symposium in this series held in Riga. Since that time the networks have, of course, considerably expanded in geographical coverage, content and data quality. Suffice it to say that there are five interrelated GEMS programme areas each containing several global networks. The programme areas are health-related monitoring (which deals with pollutants and their effects), climate-related monitoring, the long range transport of airborne pollutants, ocean monitoring, and the monitoring of renewable natural resources (forests rangelands, soil degradation, threatened species, and the like). In this the main agencies concerned are the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN). This, of course, is by no means an exhaustive or exclusive list. In developing GEMS networks great care is always taken to ensure that the data produced are of the highest quality that it is possible to obtain. Throughout the work of GEMS the emphasis is, and always has been, on data quality rather than data quantity. The main output of these GEMS monitoring networks, therefore, is data that can be compared. Such comparable data can only be obtained through the repeated rounds of intercalibration that are built into all GEMS activities that are co-ordinated through the GEMS Programme Activity Centre in UNEP. To see that the necessary intercalibration excersises are designed, agreed upon, and implemented is one of UNEP's major roles in GEMS. All this can be a lengthy and complex process. To establish GEMS-Water, for example, took close to four years of expert meetings and consultations before the final strategy, methods, and quality assurance procedures were agreed upon. Even now we know that they are far from perfect and can be considerably improved. The review, evaluation and improvement process is something that goes on continuously involving experts from many nations. All UNEP supported GEMS activities also have provisions for training and for technical assistance both of which are to ensure the participation of countries that may be inadequately provided with personnel and equipment. Over the decade of GEMS existance this approach has been very successful and is one of the main reasons why today there are 142 countries that participate in at least one GEMS activity. There is no point in monitoring data for the sake of monitoring. The information gathered must be put to some use. It is a pre-requisite, therefore, that each of the GEMS networks has associated with it a database into which monitored data are
222
M.D.
GWYNNE
placed and from which they can be accessed for analytical and assessment purposes. Any new network being developed, such as that for integrated background monitoring, must, therefore, have an associated database to go with it. Because of the financial limitations under which U N E P works, a feature it has in common with other UN organizations, it was not possible for it to develop and operate these databases with its own resources. Accordingly, some countries offered to run some of the databases either at their own expense or with minimal subsidy. These offers were, naturally, accepted though it was recognized that each database would then tend to develop independently along the lines normal to the host institute. This posed no problems in the early days when the networks were first being established. Later it was realized that the power and usefulness of the data could be increased many times over if the various data sets could be related to each other in a meaningful way. Similarly, the same data sets could also be related to particular environmental problems and to particular areas of the earth. This procedure would make these data sets into an extremely powerful assessment and management tool when focused upon a specific area or resource, particularly when joined with other high quality information drawn from additional outside sources. Computer hardware and software have now reached the stage where the establishment of such relationships through the focussing of data is feasible. The bridge between resource monitoring and resource management, for example, can now be made in a more meaningful and cost effective way. The key to these actions is both the geographical information system approach in which different data planes are related to each other and to a particular point on the earth's surface, and the development of a linked, distributed database system within GEMS. The latter will enable participating organizations to access various relevant data holdings for their own research, development or management purposes. Such a system will also undoubtedly be of great practical benefit to developing countries. At the same time it will help to generate new and better information to put into the GEMS databases thus enabling more reliable global environment assessments to be made. The latter are of particular importance to U N E P because its Governing Council has given it a mandate to be responsible for ensuring the production of a series of assessments of many environmental variables and natural resources. These will draw upon data from each of the main GEMS programme areas and are to be updated at intervals appropriate to the topic concerned - such as every ten years for tropical forest resources, and every twenty years for the world glacier inventory. In consequence, there has now been created within GEMS a geographical information system known as the Global Resource Information Database (GRID). GRID has been made possible by the generous support provided to GEMS for the purpose by a number of interested governments, organizations and industrial concerns. This support has taken the form of direct provision of staff, equipment, software, services, facilities, and support for training (Fellowships, scholarships and the like). Functionally GRID consists at present of two nodes: GRID-Processor in Geneva where most of the data processing and image analysis are carried out; and GRID-
THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT MONITORING SYSTEM (GEMS): SOME RECENT DEVELOPMENTS
223
Control in Nairobi which provides the policy guidance and management direction. Both units can provide the necessary training to potential GRID users. Later other linked GRID nodes will be developed, and discussions are already underway for nodes in the Americas and in Asia. GRID was officially launched by the two spacemen in Nairobi last May (1985); GRID-Processor became functional in August and was officially opened at a small ceremony on September 27th 1985. The first two year pilot phase will carry out global and continental studies, some regional studies, and up to eight national studies. Work has already begun on the input of the various necessary geographical databases, on the development of telecommunication links between nodes and in overcoming the technical problems of linking the various GEMS computer databases. We in UNEP think that this most recent development in GEMS will prove to be a very powerful tool for helping to understand important environmental processes and in making the best possible sustainable use of the renewable natural resources of our planet. In this respect, we are particularly interested in the development of national geographical information system resource databases within developing countries, and will be able to provide guidance to such countries on what systems to install and how to operate them. For some time past, we have been in touch with those who design microcomputers to see whether these machines could be given a geographical information system capability. In this we have been successful and there are now two micro-systems available that can use the ARC/INFO software that is the core of GRID's geographical information system, and the ELAS software that is at the heart of GRID's satellite image analysis system. We envisage such low cost geographical information system capable micro-computers being provided to developing countries to allow them to build up their own national environment and resource databases, and to access directly relevant sections of the distributed GEMS database systems that is the basis of GRID. In these ways we feel that we are taking steps to ensure that maximum use is being made of the data gathered within the GEMS networks for assessment of the state of the environment and its trends, for better understanding of environmental processes, and for better, more rational management of the environment and its natural resources. Thus, ten years after it began the United Nations GEMS effort can be seen to be both fully operational and global in scope.
