UNEP/AEWA Secretariat Launches Online National Reporting Cycle for MOP5

Bonn, 21 November 2011 – The UNEP/AEWA Secretariat is pleased to announce that it has launched the national reporting cycle for the 5th Meeting of the Parties to AEWA (MOP5, 14-18 May 2012 in La Rochelle, France) using a new state-of-the-art electronic platform for online reporting.

For the first time, the Parties to AEWA will be submitting their national reports via a customized, web-based template based on the Online Reporting System (ORS) developed by the UNEP World Conservation and Monitoring Centre (WCMC) in close cooperation with the UNEP/AEWA Secretariat.

Conceived and implemented as one of the components of a UNEP project funded by the Norwegian Government and entitled “Strengthening the Implementation of the Biodiversity-related Conventions through the Strategic Use of Information: Knowledge Management for MEAs”, the ORS is designed as a flexible tool for the creation of online national reports and is especially customized to the needs of Multilateral Environment Agreements (MEAs) and their online national reporting processes.

The UNEP/AEWA Secretariat is the first MEA Secretariat to fully adapt and use the ORS for its reporting and it has also significantly contributed to the system’s development during and beyond the life of the above-mentioned project. It is expected that after a successful completion of the AEWA MOP5 reporting cycle other MEAs, starting with the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) and its associated instruments, will also begin using the ORS for their national reporting.

In contrast to most existing reporting systems, the ORS allows MEA Secretariats to design and update quickly and easily their national reporting templates and enables them to run their respective reporting processes independently. It requires no programming on the side of the MEA Secretariat, allowing non-technical staff to make the changes to the templates directly.

The ORS includes numerous possibilities for building and customizing individual questionnaires including many different question types, dependencies, flexible re-ordering of questions and sophisticated looping questions as well as filtering options.

On the respondent level, the system allows for delegation of sections or even individual questions by designated national respondents, meaning that an MEA Focal Point can assign a section or a specific question of a given national report to those national experts most suitable to answer the selected part of the report.

The new AEWA Online National Reporting Template makes full use of the features presently included in the ORS and even includes a looping section for species, which includes photos of almost all of the 255 waterbird species covered by AEWA (and several alien species).

In terms of reporting process, the UNEP/AEWA Secretariat is currently pre-filling the last remaining online national reports based on the information submitted by Parties to previous sessions of the MOP and is issuing the user credentials to the designated national respondent as soon as the individual report has been prepared. Countries are expected to review and update their pre-filled reports by the deadline for submission of national reports to AEWA MOP5 on: 14 January 2012.

The UNEP/AEWA Secretariat would like to thank the Government of Norway for its generous support to the UNEP project on “Knowledge Management for MEAs” without which online national reporting to AEWA on the basis of a flexible ORS for MEAs would never have materialized. The UNEP/AEWA Secretariat would also like to thank the management and development team at UNEP-WCMC for their commitment to this project and looks forward to collaborating with the Centre to further enhance the ORS and build support for its further development and potential use by other MEAs.

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