World Conservation Monitoring Centre
The United Nations Environment Programme's World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) is an executive agency of the United Nations Environment Programme, based in Cambridge in the United Kingdom. UNEP-WCMC has been part of UNEP since 2000, and has responsibility for biodiversity assessment and support to policy development and implementation.[1] The World Conservation Monitoring Centre was previously an independent organization jointly managed by IUCN, UNEP and WWF established in 1988, and prior to that the Centre was a part of the IUCN Secretariat.
Areas of work
The activities of UNEP-WCMC include biodiversity assessment, support to international conventions such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), capacity building and management of both aspatial and spatial data on species and habitats of conservation concern. UNEP-WCMC has a mandate to facilitate the delivery of the global indicators under the CBD's 2010 Biodiversity Target on the rate of loss of biological diversity, and works alongside the CITES Secretariat producing a range of reports and databases. It also manages the World Database of Protected Areas in collaboration with the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas. A series of world atlases on biodiversity topics have been published by UNEP-WCMC through University of California Press. UNEP-WCMC itself is composed of multiple Programmes that are concerned with different conservation sectors: Biodiversity Informatics, Business and Biodiversity; Climate Change; Ecosystem Assessment; Food Security, Biomass and Biodiversity; Marine Decision and Support; Protected Areas; and Species.[2]
