Delegates at the Earth Observation Summit here Sunday agreed to create a global environmental monitoring system by 2014 that would help predict natural disasters, save lives and prevent billions of dollars in damage.
Ministers and ambassadors from 44 nations and 26 international groups including the European Commission agreed to a 10-year plan to kick start the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), a communique said.
The system, which would help countries share data from satellites, buoys and weather balloons around the world, "will change and improve how we perceive and understand the Earth system", the communique said.
"Such understanding is crucial to enhancing human health, safety and welfare... protecting the global environment, and achieving sustainable development," it said.
Participating nations sought to link disparate data that could lead to better understanding of phenomena such as the El Nino climate pattern.
Consolidated data gathering and analysis could help improve crop planting decisions, energy output planning and preparations for outbreaks of diseases such as West Nile virus and malaria, the group said.
The United States has said it expects to save at least one billion dollars a year in energy costs under the plan, but a standard for data gathering was sorely lacking.
"Water monitoring can be people going into streams, turning over rocks and recording the information," US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Leavitt told reporters Friday.
"But if they're not looking for the same thing and putting the data into a format that can be used, it's of little value to others."
Delegates agreed to a non-legally binding framework to start up the system, with a follow-up summit in Brussels next February to solidify the details.
"Our future challenge is to provide capability building for developing countries," co-chair and Japan's science and technology minister, Takeo Kawamura, told a closing news conference.
"We need to calculate how much funding we need to have," he said.
According to the framework statement, developing countries that have the most to benefit from better forecasting lacked adequate access to high quality data, which in itself had geographical and time gaps.
Data across different countries and systems also lacked an adequate long-term storage plan, the framework said.