Dear Ladies and Gentlemen! It is a great honor to open this symposium of the Club of Rome. Actually I have been following the activities of the Club for a long time, starting as a young post graduate student, when I picked up my exam books of computer science which was my by-subject in my doctoral thesis at the University of Technology, I chose one book, World Dynamics, by J. S. Forrester which was actually the basic book on which "Limits to Growth" was built. Finally my doctoral thesis was a kind of a blueprint for sustainable development, which was actually quite difficult to be accepted, as even the word "Sustainable Development" had not been invented yet at that time.

Related to the topic of Information Technology and the Environment, I would like to make some comments based on my experiences with the European Environmental Agency EEA, in which I am in the Management board since the start of the EEA 1994. The European Environment Agency has its head office in Copenhagen. It is the main body for the provision of environmental information for the European Union. It is not easy to have all the required information systematically worked out. There are over 20 different languages to deal with, and lots of information has to collected and processed on many different sectors.

Information technology plays an important role in providing the environmental information, for example related to European spatial data. The tasks are challenging: how to build for example spatial information into the same map on different levels. The new system which looks very promising is satellite-based, the GMES - Global Monitoring of Environmental Security. Particularly the space agencies have contributed to the solution of many problems in detail. In the satellites there is a lot of lots of extra capacity and how to use those those, is a key issue for them. Collecting environmental data is one of their potential markets.

There are already promising applications in the environmental field. Weather observations, tracking large forest fires, oil spills or flooding, or ice coverage lifting. Of course the inclusion of satellite based technologies means a change because the tradition of observing the environment has been on the grassroots level, requiring a lot of labor. If we switch a system, we need to switch other systems too, including labor on the field.

Presently there are trials to combine the information from the member states in European Union and different organizations: EEA, Eurostat, Joint Research Center, how to report to international conventions etc. One of the main problems is actually the EU itself, wanting to have different kind of information for many directives. Quite often even though we try to systemize information management, certain directives require modifications in data acquisition and processing.

And finally squeezing all that information into a format which is easy to read and understand by the users is a main challenge in the work on environmental information.

Thank you very much for your attention, I am looking forward to an afternoon with interesting presentations on information technology, competitiveness and the environment.

Symposium "Information Technology, Competitiveness and the Environment" in Helsinki, November 20, 2006
Website Management and Contact:
European Support Centre of the Club of Rome
http://esc.clubofrome.org