The report begins with a review of the demand for better information that emerged during the Summit decade, culminating with the Millennium Summit in 2000. It explains how georeferenced information can be used to bring greater precision to the understanding of spatially-related factors underlying poverty and food insecurity and discusses the role of Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information and Mapping System (FIVIMS) in promoting greater use of geospatial information. A new georeferenced database for analysing poverty and environment links – the Food Insecurity, Poverty and Environment Global GIS Database – is introduced and early efforts to make greater use of map products for monitoring poverty and food security indicators are reviewed. The report concludes with a brief summary of opportunities for using the Food Insecurity, Poverty and Environment Global GIS Database for the spatial analysis of links between poverty and environment, and applying the results to current policy issues.

This report explains how georeferenced information can be used to bring greater precision to the understanding of spatially-related factors underlying poverty and food insecurity and discusses the role of Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Information and Mapping System (FIVIMS) in promoting greater use of geospatial information.

This report presents an inventory of global data sources which can be used to provide consistent geospatial baselines for core framework data layers in the support of generalized base mapping, emergency preparedness and response, food security and poverty mapping. In the report, only globally consistent data sources at the scales of 1:5 million or larger for vector data and a nominal pixel size of 5 arc minutes or higher resolution for raster data, were considered. The sources of data presented in the inventory were identified based on a review of on-line Internet resources conducted in the first quarter of 2004 and updated in January 2005.