Summary

Summary

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) face particular sustainable development challenges, as compared to other developing countries. Their small size and isolation lead to poorly diversified economies. Their small size also limits the amount of human and material resources they can allocate to address sustainable development needs, resulting in less social resiliency, and a higher vulnerability towards environmental impacts and natural hazards.

One way of diminishing the effects of size and isolation is through cooperation amongst institutions and agencies across the region. Caribbean SIDS cannot afford to create specialized national institutions for every sustainable development area, therefore regional institutions have been created that tend to the region's needs as a whole. However, addressing sustainable development requires managing information across several disciplines, and the sharing of information and practices among institutions is critical.

Agenda 21, Chapter 40, posits that information will underpin all efforts towards Sustainable Development. In fact, the issue of Information for Decision-making was one of the last issues to be addressed in both Agenda 21 and the Barbados Plan of Action. This underscored the fundamental thinking regarding the central role information would play in achieving sustainable development. Agenda 21 further highlighted two keys issues in this challenge, namely,

	bridging the information gap within and between countries, and
	improving the availability of and access to information.

The recent agreements in Johannesburg during the World Summit on Sustainable Development again reinforces the common and shared belief that information for decision-making must be given due attention. Meeting the recently established Millennium Development Goals, which highlighted key goals from the 1992 UNCED Agreement, will clearly require all governments to give this issue increasing attention.

Thus, knowledge and information are increasingly the most valuable economic assets, and are of critical importance in moving towards sustainable development. This website seeks to facilitate access to sustainable development information useful to the Caribbean SIDS, and to guide them in managing this information to aid in decision-making.

As a step towards addressing gaps in access to information for decision-making for sustainable development in the Caribbean, the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States (GS/OAS) and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) are collaborating on a one-year effort to be implemented in the Caribbean entitled "Information for Decision-Making for Sustainable Development (IDSD) Project."

This website provides access to outputs from the IDSD Project. This includes the results gathered from assessment missions to the region, materials for a training course on information management, thought pieces and essays on approaches to information management, and a collection of best practices.

This website also functions as a portal to access information relevant to sustainable development for decision-making in Caribbean SIDS. This includes information on methodologies, information management systems in use, information on on-going projects, discussion papers related to information management, access to databases and other data sources, and regional institutions that are engaged in sustainable development projects. The following are operational definitions that further define the purpose of this website:

Information: what is it, really? Information is commonly defined as either knowledge about something, or as a collection of facts and data. We're interested here in information as knowledge, as something that can be interpreted and used for making decisions. Data by itself does not constitute useful information unless it is examined, analyzed, and processed so that it conveys a message.

Information Management is the practice of collecting, organizing, and communicating knowledge so that it can be used in the most effective way possible.

Information Management Systems: a collection of tools and techniques that facilitate information management. These might refer to traditional hard copy document filing and retrieval systems, but recently is more often linked to electronic systems such as interlinked websites forming an information network, digital clearinghouses of information, web-linked databases, search engines, etc.

Decision-making: the utility and effectiveness of a decision is in direct proportion to the quality and availability of relevant information. Efficient information management greatly increases the probability of making timely, effective decisions. Furthermore, easy access to information on institutional procedures and frameworks increases the probability of being able to implement a decision once it has been taken.

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