It hopes to copy the success of a venture with Google Inc. that made an atlas of before-and-after satellite images of environmental change available to more than 100 million viewers through the interactive mapping program Google Earth.

Now UNEP is seeking similar partnerships with firms including Microsoft, Oracle Corp., Cisco Systems and ESRI, a California-based computer mapping company, UNEP program officer Michael Wilson told Reuters.

"A lot of effort is going into developing these sorts of partnerships and finding alignment of interests," he said on the sidelines of a U.N. environment conference in Kenya.

UNEP's "Atlas of Our Changing World" was first published in hardback in June 2005 and features high-resolution images of changes ranging from dramatic deforestation in South America to retreating glaciers in the North Pole, oil exploration in Canada and the huge growth of greenhouses in southern Spain.

In environmental terms, the book became something of a bestseller, moving more than 10,000 copies at $150 each.

"For an organization like UNEP, that was an unprecedented success," said Wilson. "So we all started looking at ways we could make this information available to more and more people."

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