Capacity Building

UNEP has been extensively involved in a wide range of capacity building activities and programmes in many developing regions of the world. This involvement is mainly channeled through networking and knowledge management initiatives, as well as the provision of technical assistance at the regional and national levels for institutional building and strengthening, and for the implementation of multi-lateral environmental agreements.

For UNEP, capacity building is the vehicle to ensure wise environmental management - whether assessing global environmental trends and conditions, developing international or national legal instruments for environmental management, or encouraging new partnerships within civil society and the private sector. As a process, capacity building should also be seen as an ongoing activity rather than a discrete one-off event, that result in sound environmental choices to ensure self-reliance, equity and justice in a global perspective.

The Division of Early Warning and Assessment (DEWA) has been over the years at the forefront of UNEP’s capacity building and information management activities. It works to develop effective programmes to support national capacity building in environmental assessment, environmental information management, and early warning.

The integrated environmental assessment (IEA) approach has only recently emerged as an enhancement to “traditional” environmental assessment. The IEA approach is an interdisciplinary approach linking together available scientific knowledge from all relevant disciplines, natural environmental phenomena, human activities, and public environmental policies on a national level, for the assessment of the current state of the environment, and prediction of future environmental trends.

The key objective of DEWA West Asia's capacity building project is to implement UNEP/DEWA's global capacity building strategy and plan of work to further develop the capacity of people and training institutions in the region to undertake, participate and provide training in IEA and early warning, and to build related environmental information systems within a coherent coordinated framework. This is to be achieved by transferring UNEP’s IEA methodology to a network of partner training institutions in the region, so they will have the capacity to provide training and support to countries, sub regional and regional bodies for undertaking environmental assessments.

The purpose is to strengthen the capacity to integrate the IEA information into the decision-making and policy frameworks for sustainable development in West Asia, and to assist integrating the regional perspective into the global process.

A further key capacity building concept is the sharing of knowledge and experience amongst countries and environmental assessment practitioners. This will be achieved by the development of Internet sites and CD ROMs providing assessment data, best practices and lessons learned, and by holding regional meetings of partners.