The Southern African Research and Documentation Centre's Musokotwane Environment Resource Centre (SARDC-IMERCSA), in partnership with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Southern African Development Community Environment Land Management Sector (SADC ELMS), and the World Conservation Union Regional Office for Southern Africa (IUCN-ROSA), is compiling the second report on the State of the Environment in Southern Africa (SOESA 2000). A series of three workshops was scheduled, designed to establish a collaborative and participatory institutional framework and data structure, and to formulate an approach to production and assessment of future SOE products in general and the State of the Environment in Southern Africa in particular. The December workshop was the third workshop, and its focus was to elaborate on the way forward for the second State of the Environment in Southern Africa report.

The workshop was attended by representatives of government departments, non-government organisations, research institutions, and other specialists in State of the Environment Reporting, from across the SADC region. The SOESA 2000 project is of strategic importance to the SADC countries, as it provides enhanced information for decision making and policy development, as well as monitoring of policies, strategies, and development. It also affords a unique capacity building and networking opportunity in environmental assessment and reporting, and will feed into the GEO 2002 report, a comprehensive publication on the state of the global environment.

The workshop participants reached agreement on the SOESA 2000 process, the key elements for success of the project, and an implementation plan for these. The next steps will be to establish expert groups to design and develop a set of indicators that will be used for monitoring environmental pressures, states, and responses to change. The indicators will have to be relevant for assessment and integration at a regional scale, and must take into consideration current data limitations. Following this, a meta-data base will be established detailing location, availability, and quality of the data required for the selected indicators. A system will be established for collecting, updating, integrating, analysing, interpreting, and presenting the data for inclusion in the regional SoE report. In this fashion, the report becomes a condensed "database" which is updated regularly, reflecting changes in environmental performance.