The Google Earth website opened on Septemon the company's 3D virtual world browser and enables users to zoom in on any location of a satellite-based, color, 3D depiction of the planet. Thanks to UNEP's pioneering partnership with Google, this valuable library is now available to a global audience of over 500 million people. It has received unprecedented worldwide coverage and has won many distinguished publication awards, indicating that visual images are able to successfully convey critical global environmental information. The Atlas was an immediate success, and it has become UNEP's best selling and most profitable publication ever. By using time-sequenced photos of approximately 30 years of key hotspots on the planet (satellite imagery taken from NASA spacecraft and distributed by the US Geological Survey), visual evidence of these changes is now clear and readily available.
Because of the slow development of such issues as water shortages, forest loss, ecosystem degradation, biodiversity loss, invasive species, and climate change, it is often very difficult for policy makers and the public to visualize and appreciate both positive and negative changes to the environment and natural resource base. Subsequently, UNEP made the Atlas photos and text available on the Internet at The Atlas was highly successful in helping people identify, understand, and act on global environmental issues. The principal mandate of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is to monitor the world environmental situation to ensure that emerging environmental problems of wide international significance receive appropriate and adequate consideration by governments.Ī UNEP publication One Planet, Many People Atlas of Our Changing Environment was released at the World Environment Day ceremonies in June, 2005 and has been updated regularly since that time with satellite images of environmental hot spots around the world.
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