[en] Global change is the subject of increasingly intensive activities by the international scientific community. The International Geosphere-Biosphere Program has developed a series of Core Projects to study global change and a series of cross-cutting activities including a Data and Information System (IGBP-DIS). Satisfying the needs of these various Core Projects requires an elaborate set of global data sets, but for various reasons few of these are available as yet. Future users of environmental data will have much better data sets but the resultant high data volumes will pose significant problems. The latter is particularly true for remotely sensed data sets from various new sensor systems and from the numerous derived data sets created from them. IGBP-DIS is taking steps to coordinate data and information handling activities for the benefit of IGBP. It has recently been especially concerned with specifying a new high resolution data set from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer. 14 refs., 2 figs., 3 tabs