INFOTERRA: UNEP’s Global Environmental Information Network

Environmental problems do not respect national borders. Air pollution, ocean contamination, deforestation, and climate change affect everyone, and tackling them requires reliable information that flows freely between nations. Recognising this need decades before “data sharing” became a buzzword, the United Nations created a dedicated mechanism to connect environmental knowledge across the planet. That mechanism is INFOTERRA, the global environmental information exchange network of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). This post explains what INFOTERRA is, how it works through a worldwide chain of national contact points, the tools it built for handling environmental data, and why it mattered most for developing countries.

What is INFOTERRA? 🔗

INFOTERRA is a decentralised network created by UNEP to facilitate the exchange of environmental information within and among nations. Its origins trace back to the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, where governments called for an international mechanism to share environmental knowledge. The result was the International Referral System (IRS), established in 1975 by a decision of UNEP’s Governing Council and later renamed INFOTERRA. The system became fully operational in January 1977 with the publication of the first International Directory of Sources of Environmental Information.

The name itself is instructive. “INFO” stands for information and “TERRA” means earth, so the network is literally about information on the planet. Importantly, INFOTERRA was not built as a giant central library holding every document in one place. Instead it worked as a referral system: rather than storing all data itself, it pointed users toward the institutions and experts best placed to answer their questions. This design suited a world where environmental expertise was scattered across thousands of organisations in different countries.

INFOTERRA did not operate in isolation. It was one component of UNEP’s broader Earthwatch programme, working alongside sister systems such as the Global Environment Monitoring System (GEMS), the Global Resource Information Database (GRID), and the International Register of Potentially Toxic Chemicals (IRPTC). Together these systems gave UNEP the ability to monitor, assess, and disseminate information about the state of the global environment.

How national focal points make the network function 🔗

The backbone of INFOTERRA is its system of national focal points (NFPs). A focal point is a government-designated institution in each participating country that acts as the national gateway to the network. At its peak the network linked focal points in well over 170 countries, supported by regional service centres and specialised sectoral sources. In the United States, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency served as the focal point. This structure means INFOTERRA functions at two levels at once: globally as a coordinated network, and locally through institutions that understand each country’s specific environmental challenges.

What a national focal point actually does 🔗

Each focal point carries a set of practical responsibilities. It identifies and registers the country’s environmental experts, institutions, and information sources so they can be included in INFOTERRA’s international directory. It collects and organises national environmental data to share with the wider network. It connects local researchers, policymakers, and professionals with their counterparts worldwide. And in many countries the focal point also trains local professionals to access and use environmental data effectively. By routing queries through these focal points, INFOTERRA ensures that information exchange stays practical and tailored to local conditions rather than remaining a purely theoretical promise.

The whole network was coordinated by a programme activity centre at UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. When a query arrived that a national focal point could not answer locally, it could pass the request up the chain to the central coordination point or across to focal points in other countries. This created a genuinely global routing system for environmental questions.

India’s focal point: ENVIS 🔗

For an Indian reader, the most relevant focal point is close to home. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change designated the Environmental Information System (ENVIS) as the national focal point for INFOTERRA. ENVIS was set up as a plan programme in December 1982 to collect, collate, store, and disseminate environmental information to decision-makers, scientists, researchers, and the public. It runs as a decentralised system itself, with a focal point in the Ministry supported by a large number of subject-specific ENVIS centres hosted in institutions across the country, covering areas such as pollution control, toxic chemicals, and forest resources.

ENVIS’s role grew further in 1985, when it was also designated the Regional Service Centre (RSC) of INFOTERRA for the South Asia sub-region. This meant India did not just serve its own information needs but also helped coordinate environmental information exchange for neighbouring countries. The focal point offers both referral services, pointing users to the right source, and substantive services such as bibliographies and copies of relevant reports. It also publishes outputs like the newsletter Enviro News and the journal Paryavaran Abstracts, which reports environmental research in the Indian context.

Key products and services 🔗

Over time INFOTERRA evolved well beyond its original referral-only role. Following an independent assessment of the system in 1981, it expanded to provide substantive information and document delivery, not just pointers to other sources. The network as a whole came to handle tens of thousands of environmental queries each year, on subjects ranging from controlling lead pollution and acid rain to managing national parks and conserving fragile ecosystems. A notable feature was that most services carried no membership fee and no charge, which kept the system accessible to users who lacked deep financial resources.

The EnVoc Multilingual Thesaurus 🔗

One of INFOTERRA’s most enduring products is the EnVoc Multilingual Thesaurus of Environmental Terms. To understand why a thesaurus matters here, consider a basic problem in information science: if different people describe the same concept using different words, retrieving the right documents becomes difficult. A thesaurus solves this by providing a controlled and structured vocabulary, a standard set of terms used consistently for indexing, storing, and retrieving information.

EnVoc began life as the INFOTERRA Thesaurus of Environmental Terms and was later renamed to reflect its standing as a leading environmental vocabulary. Its real strength is that it is multilingual. The fourth edition, published in Nairobi in 1997, was made available in all six official UN languages, allowing a concept to be identified through a neutral alphanumeric notation regardless of the user’s language. This directly answered Chapter 40 of Agenda 21, which called for the establishment of standards and methods for handling information. EnVoc was significant enough to feed into later efforts such as the European Environment Agency’s General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus (GEMET), which drew on it during development.

Query response and directory services 🔗

The everyday service most users experienced was the query response service. A user with an environmental question could approach their national focal point, which would either answer directly using its own holdings, point the user to the right source, or forward the query through the network to wherever the expertise existed. A large majority of enquiries were met with substantive information, sometimes existing publications and sometimes answers tailor-made for a specialised question. Supporting this was the International Directory of Sources, a register of thousands of institutions and experts that made it possible to locate the right source quickly. To handle communication across the network, INFOTERRA partners worked in several languages, including English, French, Russian, and Spanish.

Capacity building and global access 🔗

Perhaps the most important dimension of INFOTERRA was its focus on fairness in access to information. Wealthy nations generally have well-funded research institutions, libraries, and data systems. Developing countries often do not, and frequently the problem is not the absence of useful information but the lack of technology and methods to access and manage it effectively. INFOTERRA was built to narrow this gap.

This concern was formally endorsed at the highest level. At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (UNCED), more than 170 governments adopted Agenda 21, whose Chapter 40 explicitly called on governments and international organisations to improve the global availability of information needed for sustainable development. Agenda 21 also stressed that countries should strengthen their ability to access, analyse, and use environmental information, and should support the training programmes needed to do so.

Building skills, not just sending data 🔗

INFOTERRA’s capacity-building work reflected the idea that giving someone data is not enough if they cannot use it. Through its focal points, the network promoted training programmes designed to enhance environmental information processing and utilisation, helped equip institutions in developing countries, and encouraged the exchange of information directly among developing countries rather than only along a one-way path from richer nations. Tools like the freely available EnVoc thesaurus and the no-charge query service were part of the same philosophy: lower the barriers so that a researcher or official in a low-income country could participate in the global conversation on equal terms.

For India, this played out through the steady expansion of the ENVIS network into dozens of subject-specific centres, the development of web-enabled information services, and the regional coordination role for South Asia. The result was a national environmental information infrastructure that connected Indian institutions to a worldwide knowledge base while serving local decision-makers and the public.

Why INFOTERRA still matters 🔗

INFOTERRA was, in many ways, ahead of its time. Long before the internet made global data sharing routine, it built a working model for moving environmental knowledge across borders through cooperation rather than central control. Its emphasis on controlled vocabularies, referral services, and capacity building anticipated many principles that remain central to information science today. Even where its specific products have been absorbed into newer systems, the underlying lesson endures: tackling shared environmental challenges depends on shared, accessible, and well-organised information.

What do you think? If you were designing a global environmental information network today, would you build it as a decentralised referral system like INFOTERRA or as a single central database, and what would each choice mean for developing countries? How important do you think a standardised vocabulary like EnVoc really is when modern search engines can match almost any phrasing?

References

1. https://www.unep.org/
2. https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/stockholm1972
3. https://www.unep.org/topics/ecosystems-and-biodiversity
4. https://moef.gov.in/
5. https://envis.nic.in/
6. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/244335
7. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_36.shtml
8. https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/rio1992