Executive Summary

The need for comprehensive data to assess ecosystem changes, understand the potential impacts and adopt appropriate policies has increased dramatically during the past ten years.

The increasing number of multilateral environmental agreements, the greater emphasis on sustainable development and other forces of globalization have required countries to defend and negotiate their national interests in international forums on a variety of issues.

These developments motivated the United Nations agencies and the scientific community to create global observation systems in order to ensure that the required data and information, and the ability to analyse them, are available for informed decision-making. The Global Terrestrial Observing System (GTOS) aims at improving the quality and coverage of terrestrial ecosystem data, and integrating them into a world-wide knowledge base that will help us manage our planet wisely for future generations. GTOS was launched in January 1996 to focus on the following major issues: i) changes in land quality; ii) availability of freshwater resources; iii) loss of biodiversity; iv) climate change, and v) impacts of pollution and toxicity.

The GTOS programme for Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is the first initiative to build a regional network of terrestrial observing sites. The first phase of the programme (January- September 1999) had four main components: a user needs assessment; detailed country studies for the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, organization of a workshop and the preparation of the regional implementation plan.

The CEE programme identified the main user needs related to data, information, data policy, capacity building and management requirements that GTOS should satisfy during its operation. According to these criteria, a management plan has been elaborated with regional coordination at the FAO Sub-regional Office for Central and Eastern Europe (SEUR) in Budapest.

Based on the user needs assessment, the CEE study identified loss of biodiversity, changes in land quality and pollution and toxicity as the major environmental priorities of the region. Although climate change was not directly mentioned as a priority issue, many of the data relating to land quality and biodiversity have direct applications to this topic, especially the GTOS demonstration project on Net Primary Productivity.

The first phase of the CEE identified the following relations between major threats and existing information:

• Pollution - data provide not only essential information on pollutants, but also on related human health problems and their inter-related influence on living systems and critical loads.

• Land quality - requires greater monitoring at the landscape level in order to take account of the effects of socio-economic changes in the region which cause differences in land usage.

• Biodiversity - monitoring should be expanded and existing observation networks must be integrated into a detailed global plan.

The strategy for coordination and information dissemination was formulated as a result of regional findings. A three-year Plan of Action was defined (see table below, detailed in chapter 5) with suggestions for further initiatives at a later date. A series of projects, discussed during the workshop of the GTOS CEE programme (September 1999), have been proposed. These will become operational when appropriate funding is found.

Table 1. Summary of Actions in the CEE Region

1 = year 1

2 = year 2-3

3 = year 3 and beyond