Now UNEP is seeking similar partnerships with firms including Microsoft, Oracle Corp., Cisco Systems and ESRI, a California-based computer mapping company, UNEP programme 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 UN 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 US$150 each.

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

Late last year, UN officials finished uploading the atlas to Google Earth, which covers a third of the world's population in images detailed enough to show cars.

As a result, users can now zoom in and fly over virtual environmental "hotspots" like the explosion of shrimp farms on Thailand's west coast, China's massive Three Gorges Dam or the vanishing snows of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.