Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 111

the same time, we witness that although significant parts of the actual
monitoring itself are carried out at a national level, the standardis-
ation, the computation of data, the availability of information, and
the active spreading is increasingly transboundary organised. Global
environmental data sets of UN organisations (United Nations Environ-
mental Program [UNEP], World Bank, Food and Agricultural Organi-
sation [FAO], United Nations Development Program [UNDP], United
Nations Industrial Development Organisation [UNIDO] and others),
private research institutes such as the World Resources Institute (WRI)
or Worldwatch Institute, and regional institutions such as the EU and its
European Environmental Agency are increasingly becoming available.
This multidimensional globalisation in monitoring is parallelled by a
clear tendency in monitoring of zooming in on micro-processes. With
ever more advanced techniques monitoring programs increasingly are
able to follow and detect micro-elements at molecular and submolecu-
lar levels. Nanotechnologies, genetic modifications and other develop-
ments come together with monitoring devices and programs at similar
scales.
Second, there is a change in the timescapes of monitoring, strongly
enabled by ICT developments. Time-consuming sampling techniques
of polluted water and air, analysing them in laboratories and publishing
these results in a limited amount of hard-copy reports for state agencies
seems increasingly outdated (although, as we will see in Chapter 10 ,
this is less so for some developing countries). Continuous automatic
monitoring with instant interpretation and release via digital systems
and Internet seem to become the standard in OECD countries. Auto-
matic monitoring stations for ambient air and water quality deliver
data twenty-four hours a day to Web sites on the Internet, where
such data and information are directly and constantly available for
ever-larger groups of concerned citizens, private and public organisa-
tions, and experts. 3 In the monitoring of emissions, natural resource
consumption and depletion, and products the time lag between actual
environmental disturbances and the making available of information
on those disturbances to relevant actors is diminishing. In addition,
the increasing and advanced use of monitoring via computer modelling

3

For example, wildlife is increasingly monitored in real time by Webcams,
available to the wider public. See, for instance, the monitoring of a Falcon
breeding nest in spring 2006 in the Netherlands, made available via the Web
site http://www.planet.nl/planet/show/id = 2219209/sc = cf508f.