United Nations Environment Programme Partners with Google Earth

Flying“ around a virtual planet earth, zooming in on environmental hotspots
and comparing today&apo;s crisis zones with yesterday&apo;s areas of natural beauty:
All this has become a reality today thanks to a partnership between the
United Nations Environment Programme
(UNEP) and Google Earth.

United Nations Environmental Program – The UNEP overlay for Google Earth includes successive
time-stamped images illustrating 100 areas of extreme environmental degradation around
the world. From the deforestation of the Amazon to the fallout of raging forest fires
in Sub-Sahara Africa and the decline of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, this
before-and-after imagery spanning the past 30 years offers users an online resource for learning
about the environmental crisis zones around the world.

Images of retreating glaciers and melting ice in polar and mountain areas,
explosive growth of cities such as Las Vegas, forest loss in the Amazon,
rapid oil and gas development in Wyoming and Canada, forest fires across
sub-Saharan Africa and the decline of the Aral Sea in Central Asia and Lake
Chad in Africa: this and much more is being presented in a series of „before
and after“ satellite images of our changing environment to over 100 million
Google Earth users worldwide.

Beginning today, Google Earth – Google’s 3D virtual world browser – will
feature UNEP: Atlas of our Changing Environment, offering satellite images
of 100 environmental hotspots from around the world. The project builds on
the success of UNEP’s very popular hardcover release One Planet, Many
People: Atlas of our Changing Environment, see http://www.na.unep.net/OnePlanetManyPeople/index.php.

After downloading the software from Google Earth users can access the material
via the „Featured Content“ section under „Layers“.