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CEROI Programme Description 

According to the most recent UN estimates, the amount of the global population living in cities is expected surpass 50% by the year 2005. Sustainable development in cities is of crucial importance for the development of the global environment. A sustainable local environmental policy requires knowledge and easily accessible environmental information for politicians, administrators and citizens.

Cities Environment Reports On the Internet (CEROI ) follows-up Chapter 40 of Agenda 21, and the Aarhus convention by facilitating access to environmental information for sound decision-making and general awareness-raising in cities.

The CEROI programme was established to increase awareness about the urban environment, to improve environmental policy making by providing better access to information, and ultimately to improve the cities' and the world environment.

The concept provides city authorities with an efficient tool to produce and present a report of the cities' environment on Internet. It includes a template with standard indicators and a tailor-made software for easy presentation of graphs, maps, photographs and text.

The pilot phase of the project has been supported by UNEP and the Norwegian Industrial and Regional Development Fund through a public research development contract with the Norwegian software developing company Ugland Publikit.

An international Advisory Board has been set up in order to ensure continuous communication and co-ordination between cities and organisations. This Board is composed of leaders from the UNEP Regional Office for Europe, the European Environment Agency (EEA), the Healthy Cities Project of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Global Urban Observatory of UNCHS/Habitat, and the International Council of Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).


Objectives
The CEROI programme aims to bring together a network of cities that make information about their environment available on the Internet in an easy-to-understand, well-structured, and internationally comparable format.

Through the CEROI network, information about the management of similar problems for cities around the world is easily accessed. The reports will be based on the cause-effect relationships between interacting components of the social, economic and environmental systems. More specifically, these include such indicators as driving forces of environmental change, pressures on the environment, state of the environment, impacts on population, economy, ecosystems, and response of the society. The reports are divided into approximately 10 different thematic topics, and a number of core indicators will be selected for presentation of each of the topics.


The state of environment (SoE) report will:

(1) give an overview of human-induced impact on the environment for a number of selected thematic topics;

(2) indicate the present state of the environment and current trends;

(3) show political responses to these trends;

(4) indicate the degree to which these responses have been attained; and,

(5) allow the end user to compare the environmental situation in different cities.


The reports will be physically- and conceptually- accessible to practitioners at the national level and in international assistance programmes, politicians, administrators, non-governmental organisations (NGO), schools and other interested individuals and organisations.

City reports are based on a template facilitated by a custom-made software called Publikit, developed by UNEP/GRID-Arendal and Ugland Publikit in Norway. The template provides the structure, graphical layout and framework on which to build the content of the SoE report. It also includes core indicators and proposed indicators for use within individual themes. Guidelines on how to build the report pages are offered. The Publikit software is customised for the CEROI Programme and enables cities to create, maintain and publish their SoE reports on the Internet in a user-friendly way.


Pilot phase
The CEROI Programme was initiated by UNEP/GRID-Arendal in 1996. Ugland Publikit AS, a private Norwegian company, was selected to develop the CEROI software.

A feasibility study was carried out in 1996-97 and a pilot phase initiated in 1998 and 99. During the pilot phase, 25 cities tested out a CEROI prototype in a process of continuous evaluation and improvement of the tools and templates.

On 23 August 1999, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary celebration of UNEP/GRID-Arendal, the cities of Arendal (Norway) and Turku (Finland) launched their State of Environment Reports on the Internet in the presence of the UNEP Executive Director Klaus Töpfer and the WHO Director General Gro Harlem Brundtland.

The State of Environment Reports of the South African cities of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town were launched by the Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism on 26 October 1999.


Implementation Phase
The Implementation Phase began in February 2000; the CEROI Programme currently continues to expand its network and to provide further on-line resources to support member cities in urban reporting.

The SoE reports of Kiev (Ukraine), Tbilisi (Georgia), Vennesla (Norway), Prague (Czech Republic) and Moscow (Russia) have been added.

CEROI continues to cooperate with the ENRIN (Environment and Natural Resources Information Network) Programme, ICLEI and the EEA in CEROI-related activities.


CEROI Secretariat
A CEROI Programme Secretariat has been established at UNEP/GRID-Arendal to promote, develop and facilitate the network of CEROI cities and to help raise funds for participation of cities in developing countries and in countries with economies in transition. Cities are offered to have their Internet reports hosted on UNEPnet servers located in all parts of the world, and operated and maintained from the UNEPnet Implementation Centre at UNEP/GRID-Arendal.

For member cities of the CEROI Programme, the CEROI network offers a wide range of support possibilities. The CEROI network makes it possible to compare urban SoE reports and core indicators, monitor global trends and be informed about local responses to urban environmental problems. Thus CEROI members benefit from the exchange of information on experiences and efforts in other cities.

 

 
Last updated: 14.03.2002 by The CEROI Secretariat