translate English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Overview

TROPICS provides essential infrastructure to improve effectiveness and coordination of tropical forestry aid, leading ultimately to enhanced complementarity and coherence in the sector. It does this by bringing together information about tropical forestry activities undertaken by the European Commission and European Union Member States. TROPICS works by connecting together many existing sources and types of information, allowing them to be shared more effectively within and between agencies. These include data from internal management systems, project cycle management documents, web-sites, publications and maps. By making these materials more readily accessible, it is possible to: enable policy and project staff to quickly find the information they need; improve the collective institutional memory of past activities; provide a clear, unified overview of European activities in the sector; add value to work already done, to avoid duplication of effort and, inter alia re-use existing information sources wherever possible, to minimise long-term costs of maintenance.

TROPICS at present covers 1,643 tropical forestry activities, including:    672 activities funded by the European Commission + 579 activities funded by DFID (Department for International Development - UK) + 108 activities funded by GTZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit - Germany) + 22 activities undertaken by CIRAD-Forêt (France) + 6 activities undertaken by DIDC (Department for International Development Co-operation - Finland) + 239 Dutch research projects identified by Tropenbos + information from Finland, France and the Netherlands expected by Spring 2000      + all 22 chapters of the EC/ODI 'EU Tropical Forestry Sourcebook' (1998) (Adobe Acrobat PDF files; English and French language versions) + UNDP/IFF3 survey of International Forestry Aid Flows (1999) (Adobe Acrobat PDF file) + 601 links to country information on other sites (UNDP, FAO, Agenda21 etc.) + 26 links to project websites + 43 country forest cover GIS maps from WCMC and JRC-TREES