Assessment and Classification of Greek Environmental Organizations in the Internet

Abstract

Internet is considered today as the major information source worldwide. Various environmental non-government organizations (ENGO) that generally describe environmental or ecological associations, societies, clubs, citizen’s movements, companies, centers, unions try for environmental awareness of the public and information dissemination, in local, national or international level. They use the Internet for promoting of their aims and targets, for continuous information of their members and aiming to improve their communication with active citizens. The aim of this paper is to study Greek environmental organizations in the Internet and to describe their content, to classify them as to their type of internet presence, to assess their scope extend and to further classify them according to their geographical distribution. Furthermore a model website is presented. For the retrieval of the websites in the Greek Internet, several search engines were used, as well as portals and lists supplied from the Greek Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change. Findings reveal a significant effort to effectively present environmental organizations in the Greek Internet, yet there is a lot to be done and an upgrade of the present websites is necessary in many cases