Knowledge management collaboration through InforMEA

The Secretariat is expanding its collaboration with the InforMEA Initiative and through it with other MEAs by sharing experiences and best practices on knowledge management and the development of tools and interfaces for automated data and information exchange. InforMEA is the United Nations Information Portal on Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), hosted by UNEP and funded by the European Union. It is a one-stop portal for information on MEAs searchable by key terms across treaty texts, COP decisions, national plans and reports, laws, court decisions and more. It brings together 60 global and regional legally binding treaties from 26 secretariats.

The thirteenth InforMEA Steering Committee Meeting, held in a hybrid format in October 2022 in Montreux, Switzerland, reinforced collaboration within the MEAs family. Through the establishment of communities of practice among the knowledge management officers, progress is made yearly to improve the InforMEA platform and its use across organizations. Participants deliberated on a range of issues to exchange experiences and to decide on a series of recommendations to guide the work of InforMEA over the next year on the areas of technical interoperability, semantic indexing and tagging, e-learning, outreach, reports, and dashboards, as well as joint issues such as web archiving and project data. The Secretariat of the Minamata Convention showcased its new national reporting system and a pilot on visualization of data on GEF projects. This meeting was a great opportunity to discuss the next chapter of the InforMEA portal and further collaboration on knowledge management.