NASA-International Space Station

Technology firm Cisco Systems and the NASA space agency launched a $100 million plan on to monitor the earth's resources, aiming to improve transparency of national commitments under a new climate treaty.

World leaders and ministers from more than 190 countries are meeting this week, trying to agree the outline of a new climate pact to thrive the Kyoto Protocol. Proof of compliance with many commitments under a fresh deal, for example to cut carbon emissions and preserve forests, will depend on more sophisticated data monitoring than available now.

The aim of the Planetary Skin Institute is to help existing public and private, academic and government institutions contribute to their data and analysis, for example through new online resources."A lot of information is accessible but it's highly fractured, in a thousand different formats and a thousand different places," said Cisco's Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio.

"Over the next three years we need at least $100 million to make it work. We have commitments of over half (and) expect to hit the goal in the next month."The non-profit joint venture would intend to improve monitoring of carbon, food systems and water scarcity.

For example it could incorporate existing satellite-based and ground monitoring measurements of the carbon locked in rainforests. That may make it simpler for tropical countries to claim rewards for storing forest carbon as proposed under a new climate deal. A global network would be made up of seven hubs in Brazil, India, China, Africa, Japan, the European Union and the United States.