Welcome to the new EarthTrends home page!

The EarthTrends team at the World Resources Institute has redesigned this home page as part of our continued efforts to enhance accessibility to our site's content and disseminate important environmental information. We encourage both first-time and returning users to take a few moments to orient themselves with our new homepage and learn more by clicking below.

The eighth ordinary meeting of the conference of the parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity is scheduled to take place 20-31 March 2006 in Curitiba, Brazil.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) released The State of the World's Children 2006: Excluded and Invisible, their annual flagship publication concerning children's health and well-being. The full report is available on-line; select photos, maps, graphs, and tables from the publication are available separately. The information covered in this report includes children's health issues such as HIV/AIDS, immunization, and malnutrition, and how countries can further their efforts to meet the Millennium Development Goals. EarthTrends reports many of the most prominent statistics from this publication; the relevant variables in the EarthTrends searchable database will be updated shortly.

Freedom House released its annual Freedom in the World report on September 30th. This well-respected publication relies on extensive surveys of academics, journalists, and other experts to rate the level of "Political Rights" and "Civil Liberties" available to citizens within 206 countries and territories. The data, along with country profiles, a global map, and a detailed description of the methodology can be found here.

The Poverty Resource is a special section of EarthTrends that, in part, serves as a repository for subnational datasets describing various aspects of human well-being compiled by the World Resources Institute from many sources, including The World Bank and The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN). This week, we added new country profiles for Vietnam, Brazil, and South Africa. In a