UNEP’s core mandate to ‘keep the world environment situation under review’ recognizes the importance of using scientifically credible environmental data and analysis to underpin policy and decision-making at the national and global levels.

UNEP’s World Environment Situation Room (WESR) supports city officials through the provisioning of the best available data and knowledge on the status of the environment in a dynamic, visual way. This includes providing tools that allow cities to use maps, satellite image data products, and dashboards, and trend analysis, and to allow them to question the data and put it into comparative context with best practices.

The SEVA framework is designed to facilitate easy access and connections between different varieties and velocities of data types, from global aggregated statistics to local in-situ real-time data streams. Additionally, it supports analysts and decision-makers by linking different data streams to ‘metadata semantics’ or explanations of ‘meaning’ behind the data, so that users can interactively question pertinent aspects of the data, such as its provenance, its veracity, its fitness to purpose, and connections to knowledge in the field.

Most importantly, in order to support actionable insights, SEVA allows users to investigate and save visualizations that link their own data and context to other historical and/or real-time data and environmental practices, that may be relevant and very helpful, but previously inaccessible.

Finally, SEVA can be spatialized in an immersive environment called BEEM Lab, in order to facilitate a far greater range of data scales and types to be visualized and compared simultaneously by participants, both in meetings and virtual conferences.