Overview and Background

Overview and Background

Efficient development planning and decision-making requires ready access to, handling, and sharing of environmental information. CARICOM countries have data relating to sustainable development in various stages of completeness and development, but in many instances there is a lack of knowledge on how to extract and manage the data in ways that are productive for decision-making, and for the implementation of those decisions. Further, for decision-making for sustainable development, information from various institutions and agencies often needs to be integrated. Presently, the integration of data and information relating to various sustainable development issues remains challenging – it is rarely shared and individual pieces of data are hard to access from outside the agency which collects it.

There have been many efforts to address this challenge, including the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development Indicators Programme, the recent United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) Statistics Division project on "Strengthening Capacity in the Compilation and Dissemination of Statistics and Indicators for Conference Follow-up in the Caribbean region," and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) work in the field of environmental information management. Countries in the Caribbean still require support in creating mechanisms for the long-term management of sustainable development and environment information, and in defining ways to harness this information for decision-making purposes.

Reporting to international development agencies is a process that often guides the sustainable development agenda, besides fulfilling a requisite for obtaining funding for sustainable development activities. A further challenge confronting those charged with making decisions relating to sustainable development is the lack of coordination in reporting formats for the various multilateral environmental agreements and for international donor agencies. This issue came out as a significant challenge facing countries in addressing sustainable development, and was a subject that came to the forefront during a planning mission to Barbados as a first step in the project. Since countries, in particular Small Island Developing States in the Caribbean, cannot address sustainable development alone due to the lack of sufficient financial, human, and institutional resources, participation in the various international fora provides an opportunity for them to access these resources. Often, as a consequence, annual reporting on their efforts to address and mitigate certain aspects of an environmental problem is mandatory. The high demand and regularity of reporting for multilateral environmental agencies (MEAs) stretches already limited human resources and constrains the ability of agencies to address issues such as the gaps in the information network.

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