The European Environment Agency (EEA) is the agency of the European Union (EU) which provides independent information on the environment.
The Organization of American States is an international organization that was founded on 30 April 1948 for the purposes of solidarity and co-operation among its member states within the Americas. Headquartered in the US capital, Washington, D.C., the OAS has 34 members, which are independent states in the Americas. Since the 1990s, the organization has focused on election monitoring. The head of the OAS is the Secretary General; the incumbent is Uruguayan Luis Almagro.
Thomas Eugene Lovejoy III was an American ecologist who was President of the Amazon Biodiversity Center, a Senior Fellow at the United Nations Foundation and a university professor in the Environmental Science and Policy department at George Mason University. Lovejoy was the World Bank's chief biodiversity advisor and the lead specialist for environment for Latin America and the Caribbean as well as senior advisor to the president of the United Nations Foundation. In 2008, he also was the first Biodiversity Chair of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment to 2013. Previously he served as president of the Heinz Center since May 2002. Lovejoy introduced the term biological diversity to the scientific community in 1980. He was a past chair of the Scientific Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) for the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the multibillion-dollar funding mechanism for developing countries in support of their obligations under international environmental conventions.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce that serves as the President's principal adviser on telecommunications policies pertaining to the United States' economic and technological advancement and to regulation of the telecommunications industry.
An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it and may also have various properties of how it was designed. There is no single definition, and interpretations vary with usage.
The Global Environment Facility (GEF) was established on the eve of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit to help tackle our planet's most pressing environmental problems. The GEF unites 184 countries in partnership with international institutions, civil society organizations (CSOs), and the private sector to address global environmental issues while supporting national sustainable development initiatives. Since 1992, the GEF has provided close to $20.5 billion in grants and mobilized an additional $112 billion in co-financing for more than 4,800 projects in 170 countries. Through its Small Grants Programme (SGP), the GEF has provided support to nearly 24,000 civil society and community initiatives in 133 countries.
A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization (SDO), or standards setting organization (SSO) is an organization whose primary function is developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise producing technical standards to address the needs of a group of affected adopters. Put another way, such an organization works to create uniformity across producers, consumers, government agencies, and other relevant parties regarding terminology, product specifications, protocols, and more. Its goals could include ensuring that Company A's external hard drive works on Company B's computer, an individual's blood pressure measures the same with Company C's sphygmomanometer as it does with Company D's, or that all shirts that should not be ironed have the same icon on the label.
The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open standard file format for spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed with the aim of providing an open, XML-based file format specification for office applications. It is also the default format for documents in typical Linux distributions.
Supply chain security activities aim to enhance the security of the supply chain or value chain, the transport and logistics systems for the world's cargo and to "facilitate legitimate trade". Their objective is to combine traditional practices of supply-chain management with the security requirements driven by threats such as terrorism, piracy, and theft.
Sustainable forest management (SFM) is the management of forests according to the principles of sustainable development. Sustainable forest management has to keep the balance between three main pillars: ecological, economic and socio-cultural. Successfully achieving sustainable forest management will provide integrated benefits to all, ranging from safeguarding local livelihoods to protecting biodiversity and ecosystems provided by forests, reducing rural poverty and mitigating some of the effects of climate change. Forest conservation is essential to stop climate change.
ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability is an international non-governmental organization that promotes sustainable development. ICLEI provides technical consulting to local governments to meet sustainability objectives.
The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities is the pan-European political assembly representing local and regional authorities from the forty-seven member states of the Council of Europe. Its role is to promote local and regional democracy, improve local and regional governance and strengthen authorities' self-government, according to the principles laid down in the European Charter of Local Self-Government. It is made up of two chambers, the Chamber of Local Authorities and the Chamber of Regions and holds its plenary sessions twice a year at the Palace of Europe in Strasbourg, where its permanent Secretariat is located.
Biodiversity informatics is the application of informatics techniques to biodiversity information, such as taxonomy, biogeography or ecology. Modern computer techniques can yield new ways to view and analyze existing information, as well as predict future situations. Biodiversity informatics is a term that was only coined around 1992 but with rapidly increasing data sets has become useful in numerous studies and applications, such as the construction of taxonomic databases or geographic information systems. Biodiversity informatics contrasts with "bioinformatics", which is often used synonymously with the computerized handling of data in the specialized area of molecular biology.
The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) was a program coordinated by the United States Geological Survey's Biological Informatics Office within the USGS Biological Resources Discipline. Its purpose was to facilitate access to data and information on the biological resources of the United States, utilizing government agencies, academic institutions, non-government organizations, and private industry. It was terminated 15 January 2012.
The Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (INBio) is the national institute for biodiversity and conservation in Costa Rica. Created at the end of the 1980s, and despite having national status, it is a privately run institution that works closely with various government agencies, universities, business sector and other public and private entities inside and outside of the country. The goals of the institute are to complete an inventory of the natural heritage of Costa Rica, promote conservation and identify chemical compounds and genetic material present in living organisms that could be used by industries such as pharmaceuticals, cosmetics or others.
ISAD(G) defines the elements that should be included in an archival finding aid. It was approved by the International Council on Archives (ICA/CIA) as an international framework standard to register archival documents produced by corporations, persons and families.
Environmental governance is a concept in political ecology and environmental policy that advocates sustainability as the supreme consideration for managing all human activities—political, social and economic. Governance includes government, business and civil society, and emphasizes whole system management. To capture this diverse range of elements, environmental governance often employs alternative systems of governance, for example watershed-based management.
The World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) is the largest assembly of data on the world's terrestrial and marine protected areas, containing more than 260,000 protected areas as of August 2020, with records covering 245 countries and territories throughout the world. The WDPA is a joint venture between the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the International Union for Conservation of Nature World Commission on Protected Areas.
The Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) is an independent advisory body established by the United Nations Global Environment Facility (GEF) in 1995. Seven expert advisers provide the GEF with up to date, authoritative and globally representative science in the areas of biological diversity, climate change, desertification and persistent organic pollutants.
Juan Fernando Lugris is an Uruguayan diplomat specialized in multilateral negotiations related to the environment, human rights, trade and regional integration, currently serving as the Ambassador of Uruguay to China and Mongolia. Lugris became the first Permanent Representative of Uruguay to UNEP and UN-Habitat and was the Chair of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC) in charge of developing a legally binding global instrument on mercury known as the Minamata Convention on Mercury.