Google partners with UNEP for Monitoring impact of human activity on global ecosystem

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has partnered with Google to monitor the impacts of human activity on global ecosystems by using sophisticated online tools. The purpose of the partnership is to develop a platform to enable governments, NGO’s and the public to track specific environment-related development targets with a user-friendly Google front-end. The partnership was launched during the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development at the UN headquarters in New York. Initially, the focus will be on fresh-water ecosystems including mountains, forests, wetlands, rivers, aquifers and lakes. These areas account for 0.01% of the world’s water but provide habitat for almost 10 per cent of the world’s known species and evidence suggests a rapid loss of freshwater biodiversity. Google will periodically produce geo-spatial maps and data on water-related ecosystems by employing massive parallel Cloud computing technology.