Supporting multi environmental agreements with remote sensing data. A legal perspective

In the last thirty years the rapid growth in the number of multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) has been an encouraging sign of international commitment to protect the environment. The proliferation of treaties has resulted in an increasing need for spatial data on the Earth´s biophysical systems. Although the existing satellites were not designed to meet the information requirements of environmental treaties, they can be used to generate key information necessary for developing and implementing international environmental treaties. However, although the important number of MEAs addressing a broad range of environmental issues and concerns have come into existence during the last few decades, few explicitly incorporate or depend on data and information from space-based technology.