So the United Nations, which I think at heart is progressive and evolutionary in its goals and philosophy, is mired in a certain amount of bureaucratic rather than solutions-oriented thinking. The UN Department of Early Warning and Assessment, in contrast to the Earth Charter Action Tool, is a place to get reams of data rather than user-friendly, intuitive summaries. Maybe the practitioners find this useful, but this doesn’t build the grassroots support for their lofty goals.

“The GEO Data Portal 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 450 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, data tables or download the data in different formats.”

http://www.unep.org/Dewa/early_warning/index.asp