CIESIN (pronounced “season”) was established in 1989 as a private, nonprofit organization chartered by the state of Michigan. It is structured as a consortium of university and nongovernmental research organizations. The current members of the consortium are University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan; Saginaw Valley State University, University Center, Michigan; University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland; Polytechnic University, Brooklyn, New York; and Environmental Research Institute of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. According to CIESIN officials, CIESIN’s mission is to provide access to, and enhance the use of, information worldwide on human interactions in the environment and to serve the needs of scientists and public and private decisionmakers. CIESIN uses computer and communications technology to provide tools to search for, obtain and understand data. Some of its current activities include (1) providing information on the human aspects of global environmental change to the research and policy communities; (2) furnishing computer tools for data access, research, and analysis across academic disciplines; (3) serving as a bridge between the socioeconomic and natural science research communities; (4) operating the SEDAC; (5) managing the U.S. Global Change Research Information Office; and (6) continuing the development of its Information Cooperative. The Information Cooperative is being developed to enable worldwide cataloging of data archives to be shared over the Internet. It is intended to enable rapid access to information about human activity and its relationship to the environment through a network of U.S. federal entities, including NASA, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, and Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry; state and regional environmental information systems; U. N. agencies, such as the World Health Organization; other multilateral entities, such as the Organization of American States and the World Bank; individual foreign countries, including China and Poland; and selected nongovernmental organizations and international scientific research programs. Members of the Information Cooperative work with CIESIN to make their HDGC-related databases compatible with and accessible through CIESIN’s computer network and to maintain those databases. CIESIN plans to continue to work on broadening the database capabilities and data sources supporting its mission. Further information on CIESIN’s Information Cooperative is in appendix I. To date, CIESIN has received most of its funding from federal agencies, including the Departments of Defense and Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and NASA, primarily through earmarked appropriations—portions of lump-sum amounts appropriated to agencies for general purposes. Appropriations for CIESIN through fiscal year 1995 totaled over $89 million, exclusive of over $42 million provided for building a CIESIN headquarters facility, which was subsequently withdrawn. Through June 1995, CIESIN was furnished over $82 million by federal agencies and had used almost $74 million, as shown in table 1. Nonfederal sources of funding for CIESIN totaled about $505,000 through June 1995. Most of this funding has been fees from members of CIESIN. Because CIESIN funding was largely specifically designated, the funding agencies initially had to work with CIESIN to find functions or activities for CIESIN to perform that related to their missions. These agencies used various mechanisms, including grants, cooperative agreements, and contracts, to provide funds to CIESIN for work that generally fell into three main categories: (1) obtaining data sets, (2) integrating data systems, and (3) developing software support retrieval and analysis of data. For example, CIESIN’s work for the Department of Agriculture includes five tasks under that agency’s Global Change Data Assessment and Integration Project: (1) data survey, assessment, integration and access; (2) data rescue; (3) Geographic Information Systems; (4) knowledge transfer; and (5) laboratory support. Officials at the federal agencies providing significant funding for CIESIN told us that, in the absence of actual or anticipated earmarks, funding of CIESIN would not have been requested because budgets were tight and that they all had higher priority, mission-related requirements. Of the federal agencies currently funding CIESIN, only NASA plans to do so after the remaining funds are used. NASA’s continued funding of CIESIN is for developing and operating a SEDAC. The SEDAC is one of nine Distributed Active Archive Centers under NASA’s Earth Observing System Data and Information System. The SEDAC is to develop and implement innovative activities that integrate data from both the social and natural sciences and respond to high priority information needs of policy decisionmakers. The SEDAC is also to make the HDGC data it holds—and the information about the earth science held by the eight other centers—easily available to the scientific community. NASA noncompetitively awarded the SEDAC contract to CIESIN in June 1994 for 1 year with up to four 1-year extensions. In June 1995, NASA exercised the first of these extensions, which runs to June 1996. NASA officials told us that, subject to an annual review, they plan to fund the SEDAC at about $5.7 million each year. This total amount is less than half of the average annual funding CIESIN received from federal agencies prior to fiscal year 1995. CIESIN had an increasing flow of operating funds through fiscal year 1992. However, federal agencies’ funding has been decreasing in recent years, as shown in table 2. As a result of decreasing funding and in anticipation of the pending loss of most of its current funding sources, CIESIN has been developing and implementing a strategy to find new customers from domestic, international, governmental, and commercial sources. As of June 1995, CIESIN had submitted 17 proposals and was preparing 12 more. The submitted proposals went to federal agencies, state and local government agencies, and the United Nations. The planned proposals would be funded by a mixture of private corporations, foreign countries, and state or federal agencies. CIESIN has also competed for and won peer recognition. For example, CIESIN won a competition against 22 other nominees for the Computerworld Smithsonian Award in the category of Environment, Energy, and Agriculture for its Gateway software, which is briefly described in appendix I. This award honors creative and innovative uses of technology from throughout the world. In addition, the National Research Council’s Committee on Geophysical and Environmental Data has recommended consideration of CIESIN as a World Data Center to the International Council of Scientific Unions. The recommendation was agreed to at an early 1995 meeting of the International Council of Scientific Unions. Other awards that CIESIN has competed for, and/or won, are identified in CIESIN’s letter found in appendix III. In 1994, NASA brought CIESIN under a contract, in place of a grant, to ensure the development and operation of a SEDAC. As the SEDAC operator, CIESIN is primarily responsible for providing users with access to HDGC data and information. It neither does nor sponsors basic HDGC research. In early 1994, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Mission to Planet Earth wrote that “by rescoping CIESIN’s mission to include only SEDAC-related activities, NASA now possesses the necessary expertise to manage CIESIN. Because the context within which SEDAC will operate is data management and integration, NASA is more uniquely qualified for this role than any other federal agency.” To help it oversee CIESIN’s management of the SEDAC, NASA established a SEDAC Users Working Group in November 1994. The working group consists of social scientists and other experts from universities, state and federal agencies, and environmental groups and other private institutions. According to one of the co-chairs of the working group, the working group has significant influence over the SEDAC, and it makes sure the SEDAC serves the needs of both the earth sciences and socioeconomic segments of the global change research community. The working group has thus far offered several recommendations for improvements. In the Conference Report explaining the Veterans Affairs and Independent Agencies Appropriations Act for fiscal year 1995, Congress provided the National Science Foundation with $6 million “. . . for a global climate change initiative for a center or consortium for the human dimensions of global climate change.” In December 1994, the Foundation announced the special funding opportunity to facilitate HDGC research, promote HDGC education, and foster interdisciplinary research collaborations on HDGC issues. The Foundation intends to sponsor a variety of HDGC activities under the funding opportunity. The Foundation received 52 proposals for its funding opportunity competition. One was from CIESIN, in which it proposed to provide a data archive and resource center for the HDGC research community. Thus, as HDGC researchers work under Foundation grants, CIESIN would provide electronic data and software support services. When the research is completed, CIESIN would archive and provide access to the research data.Consequently, there would be no duplication between the functions to be performed by the Foundation’s HDGC research centers and research teams and the functions CIESIN would perform. Through the early part of fiscal year 1993, Congress had appropriated over $46 million for the proposed CIESIN building but in subsequent years gradually withdrew the funding. In the fiscal year 1993 Veteran Affairs and Independent Agencies Appropriations Act, Congress earmarked $42 million for the CIESIN headquarters facility. Later, in July 1993, Congress reduced the amount of available appropriations to $37 million.In October of that same year, Congress directed that another $10 millionnot be used until completion of a NASA Inspector General report. The fiscal year 1995 appropriations act specifically rescinded $10 million. The balance of $27 million was recently rescinded by law.