The Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS) of UNEP

Abstract

The Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS) is a collective effort of the world community to acquire, through monitoring, the data needed for rational management of the environment, and arose from recommendations of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment which was held in Stockholm in 1972. The GEMS Programme Activity Centre (PAC) at UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, coordinates all that it can of the various environmental monitoring activities which are carried on throughout the world—particularly those within the United Nations System.Great care is taken to ensure that data gathered by GEMS are of the highest attainable quality, and that data collected from different parts of a particular monitoring network are both comparable and compatible. The GEMS Programme Activity Centre (PAC), in the manner of UNEP itself, is not operational but works mainly through the intermediary of the Specialized Agencies of the United Nations System—most notably FAO, ILO, UNESCO, WHO, and WMO—together with appropriate intergovernmental organizations such as IUCN.The GEMS monitoring system consists of five closelyinterrelated programmes which have built-in provision for training and for rendering technical assistance to ensure the participation of countries that are inadequately provided with personnel and equipment. The five are:1. Climate-related monitoring;2. Monitoring of long-range transport of pollutants;3. Health-related monitoring (concerned with pollutional effects);4. Ocean monitoring; and5. Terrestrial renewable-resource monitoring.Each of these broad areas contains at least five distinct world-wide monitoring networks. Examples of these latter are the World Glacier Inventory, Background Air Pollution Monitoring Network, Urban Air Pollution Monitoring Network, Global Water Quality Monitoring Network, Tropical Forest Monitoring Network, Species Conservation Monitoring Network, etc.Monitored data are gathered at suitable coordinating centres for each network at which appropriate data-bases have been, or are being, established. Data are analyzed to produce periodic regional and global assessments which are reported at intervals that are appropriate to the variable which is being considered.