Introduction

In case you haven't guessed it yet: This is the icon you should take care of throughout the Portal: This enables you to get back to this help file from whereever your are.

About

This is the HELP file for UNEP's Environmental Data Explorer.

The Environmental Data Explorer is the authoritative source for data sets used by UNEP and its partners in the Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report and other integrated environment assessments. Its online database holds more than 400 different variables, as national, subregional, regional and global statistics or as geospatial data sets (maps), covering themes like Freshwater, Population, Forests, Emissions, Climate, Disasters, Health and GDP. Display them on-the-fly as maps, graphs, raw values or download the data in different formats.

But you'll probably know this already... So here is the more important information:

User agreement

Conditions for Use of this Application and Data therein

• Use of the "Environmental Data Explorer" for download purposes is in a few cases limited through password-protection to UNEP Collaborating Centers (CCs), within the context of the GEO Report, and for their internal institutional use only.
• The users do not obtain title to the intellectual property of the data held in this application, nor any copyright or propriety rights to its content.
• The users are not allowed to transfer, sublicense, rent, lease or sell the data therein.
• As the data provided are the intellectual property of the organizations which supplied the information, the original source of the data must be fully acknowledged.
• Please refer to the respective organizations for further inquiries regarding copyright and user limitations.
• The designations employed and the presentation of material on this map do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.
• Under no circumstances will UNEP be liable for any damages resulting from use of the "Environmental Data Explorer" provided on-line through this application.

If you disagree with these terms, please exit!

Disclaimer

The designations employed and the presentation of material do not imply any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNEP or the United Nations concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries.

Requirements

The pages are programmed to run under any browser. Unfortunately, as the technologie advances, there are some difficulties to keep up with the different versions of especially JavaScript used by the browser-producing companies. Thus, we did the most to conform to the given standards, but some visibility problems can occur. Anyway it should run under all recent browser versions (IExplorer 5.x, Netscape 6, Opera 6, Mozilla).

Please note: The use of Netscape 4.x poses some serious problems, as it has difficulties to read complex tables.

Future enhancements

We are always, at any day, at any time (hmm, almost), updating the Portal - be it on the technical or on the content side. Some bugs are known and will be fixed for the next release. Further enhancements include:

  - better graphing capabilities
  - better map display
  - additional display options for the raw values with cross-comparision
  - ...

.. and possibly a lot of other things. If you have requests, ideas or discover bugs, you can mail them to us.