National Reporting Form for CMS COP11 now available

Bonn,
15 October 2013
- The UNEP/CMS Secretariat is pleased to announce the release of the national reporting form for the CMS COP11 reporting cycle in the CMS Family Online Reporting System (ORS). For the first time, the Parties to the Convention on Migratory Species will submit their national reports through this web-based questionnaire.



The UNEP/CMS Secretariat is currently pre-filling the last remaining online national reports based on the information submitted by Parties to COP10 before the official reporting deadline. The Secretariat will issue the user credentials to the respective National Focal Point as soon as the individual report has been prepared. Parties which did not submit a timely report in 2011 will have to fill in the entire questionnaire.

Countries are expected to complete and submit their national reports by the deadline for submission to CMS COP11, 1 May 2014.

Guidance for users is provided on the CMS website as well as within the system itself. Numerous help texts are available when hovering over menu items with the mouse, and further documentation is available on the “Help pages”.

The questionnaire can be accessed upon login. Please do not hesitate to contact the Secretariat with any questions regarding the system or the information that is requested.

Francisco Rilla, Information and Capacity Building Officer, [email protected]t

Natalie Epler, Associate Information Management Officer, [email protected]

Background information

The Online Reporting System (ORS) was developed by the UNEP World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) in close cooperation with the UNEP/AEWA Secretariat. It was conceived and implemented as one of the components of a UNEP project funded by the Norwegian Government entitled “Strengthening the Implementation of the Biodiversity-related Conventions through the Strategic Use of Information: Knowledge Management for MEAs”. The system is designed as a flexible tool for the creation of online national reports and is especially customized to the needs of Multilateral Environment Agreements (MEAs) and their national reporting processes.

The ORS allows MEA Secretariats to design and update quickly and easily their national reporting templates and enables them to run their reporting processes independently. It requires no programming on the side of the MEA Secretariat, allowing non-technical staff to make changes to the templates directly.

The system includes numerous possibilities for building and customizing questionnaires, including many different question types, dependencies, flexible re-ordering of questions and sophisticated looping questions as well as filtering options. On the respondent level, the system allows for delegation of sections or even individual questions by designated national respondents, meaning that an MEA Focal Point can assign a section or a specific question of a given national report to those national experts most suitable to answer the selected part of the report.

Links

UNEP-WCMC about the Online Reporting System

COP10 Resolution 10.7, Outreach and Communication

COP10 Resolution 10.9, Future Structure and Strategy of the CMS and the CMS Family

 

Last updated on 16 June 2014