Microsoft Corporation signs agreement with UNEP

By Dan Muhuni

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Microsoft Corporation have signed a memorandum of understanding to work together on leveraging information and communication technology (ICT) solutions to help address today's complex environmental challenges.

The signing took place yesterday during UNEP's 25th session of the Governing Council and Global Ministerial Environment Forum on the theme "Globalization and the Environment", held at UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, and attended by more than 100 environment ministers.

The partnership focuses on helping environmental stakeholders - including UNEP and other international organisations, governments, nongovernmental organisations and researchers - work more effectively by making use of new technologies.

UNEP and Microsoft are cooperating to support UNEP's mandate of promoting environmental understanding and increasing public knowledge about environmental factors and the problems facing future generations.

Areas of cooperation include providing access to research and scientific information on the environment, Building integrated knowledge platforms to enable better cooperation between different actors and supporting the development of applications for environmental sustainability management.

"We view our partnership with Microsoft as key to delivering solutions on a scalable level to a community of more than 190 nations and the UN system as a whole," said Achim Steiner, UNEP executive director.

"UNEP's ability to mobilise information technology and the platforms for sharing environmental information is a precondition for working together as an international community to tackle environmental issues."
"Without equitable access to information and the capacity for developing countries to engage on an equal level in negotiating key agreements like the climate change treaty or the biodiversity convention, we will not make much progress," he said.

UNEP and Microsoft have been collaborating since 2006 on Research4Life, a public-private partnership that includes the Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE) consortium.

Research4Life provides access to the latest scientific research through an online library of more than 7,500 peer-reviewed scientific journals, books and databases, made available by 130 publishers at low or no cost to developing countries.

OARE focuses on environmental information, providing scientists, practitioners and policy-makers in participating countries with the information they need to implement targeted programmes and make environmentally sound decisions.

The platform is already having an important impact on communities, such as in Kenya's Rift Valley, where researchers used OARE resources to address pollution of the Njoro River watershed through a series of programmes, resulting in a reduction of waterborne diseases among the local population and cleaner use of the river.

Also, Microsoft Research's Computational Science Lab in Cambridge, UK, is partnering with the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) to advance environmental and ecosystem science, prioritising areas of urgent concern in environmental policy, at the intersection of climate change, biodiversity, human activity and sustainability.

WCMC is the world's authoritative institution for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystems for conservation purposes and collecting data globally on important biodiversity indicators.
Microsoft Research's Computational Science Lab is one of the world's leading research laboratories pioneering new computational approaches to tackle fundamental challenges in the science of complex natural systems.

At the same time, a seven point plan to reduce the risk of hunger and rising food insecurity in the 21st century has been outlined in new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Changing the ways in which food is produced, handled and disposed of across the globe - from farm to store and from fridge to landfill - can both feed the world's rising population and help the environmental services that are the foundation of agricultural productivity in the first place. Unless more intelligent and creative management is brought to the world's agricultural systems, the 2008 food crisis - which plunged millions back into hunger - may foreshadow an even bigger crisis in the years to come, says the rapid assessment study. The report, entitled ‘The Environmental Food crises: Environment's role in averting future food crises', has been compiled by a wide group of experts from both within and outside UNEP.