W. Frederick Zimmerman
Sustainable development requires sustained commitment by the world community of nations to cooperate in dealing with transboundary environmental problems. International environmental treaties represent one key mechanism by which nation- states reach common understanding of such environmental problems and mutually agreeable approaches to mitigating them. Information about the status of treaties over time, including changes in the level of international participation, can thus provide important evidence of trends in international political and institutional commitment to sustainable development.1 The linkage of treaty information with other types of political, social, and environmental data may provide useful insights into factors potentially important in the development and implementation of sustainable development policies at national and international levels.
The Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) has developed a unique Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators service (WWW URL http://sedac.ciesin.org/entri) that empowers users to analyse institutional sustainability. ENTRI permits detailed, nearly instantaneous public access to the key documents that define relevant international political regimes and to data that characterize national-scale environmental, socio-economic, and political phenomena.
The ENTRI service is funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Socio-economic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC). CIESIN has been designated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to create and operate SEDAC, one of the data centres in the Earth Observing Data and Information System (EOSDIS). CIESIN, was established in 1989 as a non-profit, non-governmental organization to provide information that would help scientists, decision-makers, and the public better understand their changing world. CIESIN serves as the World Data Center-A for Human Interactions in the Environment.
ENTRI contributes to EOSDIS and the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) by connecting national-scale socio-economic, environmental, and Earth science indicators, 'high-level' outputs of the scientific process aimed at understanding the Earth system, with treaty status data, or 'high-level' outputs of the political process aimed at responding to improved understanding of the Earth system.
Thus, ENTRI provides users with information about selected issues related to the human dimensions of global environmental change:
The issues covered in ENTRI were selected by a CIESIN team working in conjunction with an expert advisory board. The initial objective was to provide users with information in the core mission areas identified as priorities by Mission to Planet Earth and SEDAC. While ENTRI is not directly targeted at sustainable development, ENTRI's topical coverage is broad enough to encompass many aspects of the subject, and ENTRI can readily be used to illuminate the understanding of the social and institutional aspects of sustainable development.
THE ENTRI SYSTEM
For the sustainable development researcher, the heart of ENTRI is a WWW interface to an Oracle relational database that integrates several kinds of disparate data and information:
The ENTRI system enables the user to ask 'basic questions' (prestructured queries of the relational database) about treaty status, national environmental conditions, and the relationship between the two.
Queries can also be submitted to search the complete text of the treaty collection for phrases such as 'sustainable development' .
DATA AVAILABLE VIA ENTRI
An important distinguishing feature of ENTRI is that it brings together multiple types of data from many different providers in a format that meets users' needs while respecting the integrity and autonomy of the different data sources. The ENTRI staff takes great care to give credit where credit is due by acknowledging the contributions and intellectual property rights of third party data providers and, where necessary, negotiating payments for permission to use data. As of February 1997, data providers were:
As of February 1997, ENTRI contained the full text of 120 environmental treaties; status information about 425 environmental treaties; summary information for 155 environmental treaties and other agreements; and 145 socio-economic and environmental variables for the 200-odd nations of the world. On-line documentation is available for each data collection and the data are updated regularly. The ENTRI team expects to update IUCN status data in early 1997.
The initial set of national resource indicators available via ENTRI was drawn from World Resources 1996-97: A Guide to the Global Environment by the World Resources Institute. This collection was selected to provide users with an initial collection of variables that was broad, robust, and reasonably representative. The ENTRI staff is now working on adding variables that enhance user understanding of global environmental issues. The next major upgrade to the ENTRI system will include a number of new variables that relate to the social, political, and institutional aspects of sustainable development. Please check on-line at WWW URL http://sedac.ciesin.org/entri for the latest information about available data.
ANALYSING SOCIAL AND INSTITUTIONAL ASPECTS OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT VIA ENTRI
There are a number of ways that ENTRI can be used to evaluate and measure social and institutional dimensions of sustainable development. One simple approach is to analyse the extent to which particular nations participate in treaties that have been identified as favourable to sustainable development. From the ENTRI home page, the sustainable development researcher can proceed to basic question 2, 'Which treaties are in force for a given state?'. This question can be used to gather the raw data needed to compare the extent to which different nations participate in international environmental regimes.
This sort of analysis is potentially valuable to compare the local and global response to various treaty regimes. For example, some ENTRI users have reported using dates of signature and entry into force to make inferences about the relationship between trade and environmental policy. Similarly, the section of the recent UNEP Global Environmental Outlook report devoted to 'Overview of Regional Policy Responses' observes that 'a heartening sign is the tendency to strengthen regional and sub-regional cooperation world-wide'.2 A scholar interested in examining this hypothesis more closely might operationalize it via ENTRI: 'if institutional support for sustainable development is increasing, recently negotiated treaties for regional environmental cooperation should have entered into force more swiftly than their predecessors' .(It is important to note, however, that great care must be taken in such analysis. There may be a multitude of explanations for the velocity with which a particular treaty regime is adopted.)3
A unique new dimension of analysis is supported by ENTRl's basic question 5, 'What are the values of selected variables for all states that are (or are not) parties to a particular treaty at a given time' ? The significance of this query is that it enables users to explore the relationship between participation in a given treaty regime and the values of national resource indicators which characterize the state of sustainable development in a particular country or countries. For example, a user can ask, 'For those nations that are parties to the International Tropical Timber Agreement, what percentage of national land area is protected areas' ?
Since ENTRI includes status data about 425 treaties and more than 145 national-scale variables, there are a large number of such queries that might be operated via ENTRI relative to sustainable development. The possibilities are limited only by the availability of data and the 'basic questions' format of pre structured queries. With additional funding from non-NASA sponsors, ENTRI could provide access to a much larger collection of indicators directly targeted at supporting a research agenda into sustainable development.
The initial results of deploying the ENTRI system have been encouraging. ENTRI has a solid and growing user community. As of February 1997, ENTRI served about 15,000 transactions to more than 2500 unique hosts each month. Qualitative responses from users also seem to confirm that ENTRI has become an important tool for researchers interested in the institutional aspects of sustain- able development.
In the future, the ENTRI team hopes to continue to make the system more useful as a tool for understanding the institutional aspects of sustainable development. For example, it should be possible, using existing data and system capabilities, to calculate various indices of participation in environmental regimes and to generate tables that make it easy to compare participation across nations and treaties. More generally, ENTRI is also exploring options for providing direct access to the under-lying database, either via an ENTRI query-building language (EQBL) or via direct SQL access for authorized users.
NOTES
1 See, for example, Roberts J. Timmons, 'Predicting Participation in Environmental Treaties: A World-System Analysis'. Sociological Inquiry 66: 1, February 1996: 38-57 and Dietz, Thomas and Kalof, Linda, 1992, 'Environmentalism Among Nations.' Social Indicators Research 26:356-366.
2 United Nations Environment Programme (1997) Global Environmental Outlook-1. United Nations Environment Programme Global State of the Environment Report 1997. Sioux Falls, South Dakota. WWWURL:http://grid2.cr.usgs.gov/geol/exsum/ex4.htm. The GEO report cites ENTRI as a reference.
3 For comments about some of the legal and technical reasons why states are sometimes slow to adhere to treaties, see Schachter, Nawaz, and Fried (1971) Toward the Wider Acceptance of UN Treaties.