A Global Monitoring Plan was designed to monitor POPs in the environment and to protect human health. The focus of the Global Monitoring Plan to support the effectiveness evaluation of the Stockholm Convention is on environmental background concentrations in media with a high potential for comparability.

A POPs Global Monitoring Program (GMP) was developed to facilitate the evaluation and monitoring process. The main objectives of the Program are:

• a) To evaluate actual reduction or elimination of POPs according to the Stockholm Convention

• b) To provide a harmonized organizational framework for the collection of comparable monitoring data on the presence of the POPs listed in the Convention

• c) To provide information on the regional and global environmental transport of these POPs

• d) To detect the trends in levels of POPs exposure in human

The POPs Global Monitoring Plan Data Warehouse (GMP DWH) has been developed by the Stockholm Convention Regional Centre in the Czech Republic through the Research Centre for Toxic Compounds in the Environment, Brno, Czech Republic (RECETOX) and the Institute of Biostatistics and Analyses, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, under the guidance of the GMP Global Coordination Group, and based on Chapter 6 of the Guidance on the Global Monitoring Plan for Persistent Organic Pollutants relevant to data handling (UNEP/POPS/COP.6/INF/31).

The GMP Data Warehouse (DWH) is designed to work with data from a wide range of heterogeneous sources, such as national monitoring programmes or large international monitoring networks.

The data reporting model involves compiling and archiving primary GMP data within a “regional data repository” in the GMP DWH. In addition, the GMP DWH compiles and archives aggregated data, including supplementary data, in cases where no primary data is made available.

Only reliably reported concentration values can be accepted for any spatial or temporal comparison. Therefore, a multilevel evaluation procedure based on the annually aggregated concentration values is proposed in order to maintain a high predictive value of the GMP records while avoiding bias in the concentration values.

Compatible data records stored in the GMP DWH are considered by members of the respective regional organization group and validated for further use in the publication.

ISO 19115:2003/19139

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