About This Service

This project's innovative and rational approach to information, as well as the involvement of stakeholders in the process, will greatly improve upon existing scattered Internet sources on this subject. We seek to facilitate greater access to material on population-environment relationships and promote more coordinated exchanges among researchers and others.

We seek your assistance in making this service of great value to you. Please contact us and let us know what you think about:

• The way the issue of population and environment linkages has been divided up into topics and subtopics.
• How the information is presented. What would you like to see that you do not?
• The information content. Do you have suggestions about information that is not on the site but should be?
• Whatever you feel can make this site more useful.

The Need

The Internet can be a valuable tool by enabling information scattered around the world to be accessed simply and rapidly using technology that is becoming increasingly cheap and accessible. But it is a constant challenge to find information on topics like population and environment linkages that is really useful even when one is willing to spend hours "surfing the net."   Because of the large variation in the quality of information from site to site, simply locating an apparently relevant site does not necessarily yield the desired information. Common problems include: [1] providing only autobiographical material, [2] information formats which require the latest and fastest computers and software, [3] confusing organization of information, and [4] little or no response to the needs of users.  This project attempts to overcome these problems and "sew the quilt together" in order to provide users with quick access to useful information on population and environment.

Listening and Hearing: Assessing User Needs

To help guide the project, CNIE, with the in-kind assistance of The Futures Group International, has formed an advisory group on population and environment linkages. Although this group contains many experts, we really want to hear directly from people like yourself, using this site. Tell us what you like and don't like, what types of information would you like to gain electronic access to and which format would make it most useful?

Finding What You Want: Organizing Information for Simple, Quick Access

We have developed what we hope is an easy-to-use framework for organizing information. This hierarchical framework will include several levels of information, ranging from short introductory materials for the nonspecialist through nontechnical and technical articles and reports, to databases. This framework should be a "lens" through which the user can see the many different types of information available -- providing an easy-to-use pathway to information at the right technical level and in the right format to be useful.

With the ongoing input of people like yourself, we will connect information to the framework at the appropriate location within a framework based on content and degree of technical difficulty.

Responding to the Information on this Site: Information in Context

To provide quality assurance, CNIE tries to always provide key pieces of information such as:

• Type of Information Resource.
• Author(s).
• Affiliation of author .
• Information about the review process which the information has undergone if available .
• A Brief Abstract with an indication whether the source of information is an advocacy group.

We hope that this "metadata" helps you put the information into a context where you can make your own judgment on its worth.

Making New Information Available

We are incorporating into this project many sources of information that have not been available via the Internet before, even commissioning new materials where needed. We encourage you to make relevant information available on the Internet, so that we can incorporate it into our framework.

Once again, we want to hear from you! -- Dr. Peter Saundry, Executive Director of the National Council for Science and the Environment