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.

Further information: