Need for the Project
With the growing awareness of the environment along the U.S.-Mexican border, the need for public access to environmental information has increased. Urbanization, industrialization, and population expansion—along with economic integration under the North American Free Trade Agreement—have combined to stimulate a vigorous discussion in border communities about environmental issues, sustainable development, and quality of life. Members of the public, NGOs, Indian tribes, and local and state government officials have all articulated the need for better information about the border environment. However, information access is a fairly difficult process that is complicated by the realities of the U.S.-Mexican border. There are many different agencies and different ways of operating on both sides of the border. In addition, the communities along the border have many similar problems such as air pollution or water quality issues but differ as to how these problems should be addressed. Many communities that want to become more involved in developing solutions for border environmental problems are handicapped by the lack of reliable, readily accessible information. Border environmental information includes not only monitoring data, but also information on what agencies and organizations are involved in dealing with border environmental issues.
Project Description
This project will develop an arena where community members can find out what other people and groups are doing to understand and resolve border environmental problems. It will provide access to the agencies and people working on the solutions. It will also serve as a roadmap of how to find basic environmental data for the transborder region.
Project Components
This project will have two main components:
Inventory
Directory
Both will be made available to the public through the World Wide Web and through printed hard copies. These two sources will complement each other and will help to maximize the use of the system by stakeholders in the region. Community members from all sectors will be the primary users of the Inventory and Directory. It is anticipated that U.S. and Mexican elected officials and private- and public-sector agencies will be secondary users.
Inventory
The Inventory will consist of environmental information, metadata (data about data), databases (data, data sets), projects, program activities, grants information, and other useful border-related information. Rather than controlling large datasets and huge amounts of data, the emphasis of the Inventory will be to identify the types of relevant environmental data already available over the Internet and to establish a convenient and reliable mechanism to lead people to that information. The Inventory will provide context for the particular sets of information, including suggestions for access and use of that data. Finally, the Inventory will include a search mechanism for the online version and indexes for the hard copies to enable users to conveniently search for information by geographical location, media, or other descriptors.
For example, an individual searching for information on air quality along the border will be led to a page on the project web site that will list the various sources of air data. On that page, or another, there will be a short summary description of the CICA (U.S.-Mexico Information Center on Air Pollution/Centro de Información sobre Contaminación de Aire) web site and a hot button to lead the user to that site.
Directory
The Directory will contain useful information on agencies, organizations, groups, and projects that are engaged in activities related to environmental information for the border region. Name, address, telephone, e-mail, project or activity description, and contact person will be included. Directories dealing with border environmental matters will also be listed. Maintenance of the Directory will be accomplished by linking it to the Inventory, so that updates of the Inventory also provide data for the Directory.
Format and Distribution
The Inventory and Directory will be made available to potential users through the World Wide Web. These two products will reside in a server maintained by San Diego State University. They will be in English and Spanish. Recognizing that only some of the stakeholders for the border environment have ready access to the World Wide Web and it may be as much as a decade before there is a more general access, hard copy versions of the Inventory and Directory will be produced and widely distributed on both sides of the border.
Project Partners
The Border Environmental Information Public Access Project is a collaborative effort among EPA, SEMARNAP, the Environmental Information Work Group of Border XXI, San Diego State University, and the U.S.-Mexico Border Information Institute (Instituto de Informácion Fronteriza Mexico-Estados Unidos), a nongovernmental organization in Ciudad Juárez. The Autonomous University of Baja California will also be an active participant in the project, facilitating the acquisition of data and participating in other activities.
As the project progresses, the environmental information stakeholders in the project will participate in the output design, data collection, and other key aspects of the efforts. It is hoped that the Environmental Information Work Group will become a critical player in the project, receiving regular updates from the project team and providing input on a periodic basis. NGOs, local governments, Indian tribes, community members, and the private sector on both sides of the border will actively participate and contribute through a general outreach effort that will include a preliminary home page and distribution of published informational materials. Part of this outreach effort will include a survey that will be widely distributed to collect information from representative stakeholders about environmental information needs.
Advisory Panels
Two advisory panels will be established to support the work of the project. A borderwide advisory group will include key individuals from Mexico and the United States along the border. A regional transborder advisory board will also be established with members from the California-Baja California border area, whose geographical location will facilitate frequent meetings. The boards will not only provide input on all phases of the project, but will serve to test the products of the project—the web site, Directory, and Inventory
Project Workplan
The initial phase of this project will be conducted at San Diego State University and is funded through an 18-month cooperative agreement with EPA. This phase will first concentrate on the project system design and acquisition and inclusion of federal-level information for the Inventory and Directory. Then, as time and resources permit, state-level information, as well as that from nongovernmental organizations and universities, will be integrated into the system.
After the completion of the initial phase, support will be sought to develop user-friendly applications to enable members of the border communities to more easily acquire the data they need. This will likely proceed on a media-specific and regional basis.
The project research team has begun to develop the draft format for the web page. Once a template has been designed, it will be submitted to the project partners for review. The web page will include a survey form for community and user input and suggestions. The web site will also include a template for use by agencies with electronic databases relating to the border environment for submitting information to be included in the Inventory and Directory.
Project Milestones
Below are major milestones for the project:
Initial draft of web page and initial introduction of project to community - October 21, 1997
First Release of Web page: on-line working copy of web site incorporating changes from Border XXI Workgroup meeting. – November 14, 1997
Second Release of Web page: on-line working copy of web site incorporating changes from Advisory panel and Community Board meetings - February 1998
Third Release of Web page: June 1998
Fourth and Final Release of Web page Working Copy: October 1998
Hard Copy Release and distribution: March 1999
End of Phase I of Project: April 1999
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