Mandate:
Parties to the Basel Convention are required to transmit their national reports to the Secretariat pursuant to article 13, paragraph 3.
Frequency:
Annually.
Format:
The Conference of the Parties to the Basel Convention at its sixth meeting (December 2002) adopted a format – revised questionnaire on “transmission of information” and a manual to further facilitate national reporting by Parties. The questionnaire consists of two parts: Part I and Part II. Part II has two sections - Section A and Section B. Click on the following links to access the pre-filled (password protected) and blank questionnaires. The manual is available in all six official United Nations languages and can be accessed by clicking on the following links: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
Procedures and processes of the Secretariat
In September of each year, the Secretariat sends an e-mail to all Parties requesting them to submit, before the end of the calendar year, a report containing the information requested for the previous calendar year.
In order to facilitate reporting, Part I and Part II Section A (Tables 8A and 8B) of the said questionnaires are pre-filled by the Secretariat for those Parties that have reported at least once for the year 1999 or afterwards. New Parties and Parties which have not reported since then should use blank revised questionnaires to submit their national reports. Both, pre-filled and blank questionnaires are made available on the convention website.
It is preferred that Parties send electronic version of the completed questionnaire to the Secretariat for the ease of transferring the information and data contained in the completed questionnaire to the Reporting database of the Basel Convention.
The Secretariat sends two reminders to those Parties that did not meet the deadline. The Secretariat generally concludes the collection process in August following the expiration of the deadline but, to make the compilation documents and country fact sheets as comprehensive as possible, the Secretariat also takes into account the data and information reported by Parties until September.
Upon receipt of the completed questionnaires, the Secretariat carries out quality control of the data and information, to the extent possible, and sends queries asking for clarification when necessary.
The data and information received is entered and stored by the Secretariat in the Reporting Database which was developed by the Finnish Environment Institute. In addition, all the data and information provided by Parties is used in the preparation of the Compilations and the Country fact sheets. Both sets of documents are made available on the Basel Convention website (www.basel.int).
For further information on national reports, please click here.