[en] Over the last decade, two significant developments have taken place relative to international and national information systems for radioactive waste management: (1) The Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management came into force 2001.06.18. It establishes commonly shared safety objectives and sets out the specific obligations of Contracting Parties aimed at achieving those objectives. Adherence to these national obligations will be monitored through an international process of peer review by the other Contracting Parties. Each Contracting Party must prepare a report on the measures taken to meet its obligations under the Joint Convention, which will be distributed for review by all Contracting Parties. In review meetings, each national report will be discussed along with the comments and questions from other Contracting Parties. (2) Agenda 21 resulted from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development that was held June 1992 in Rio de Janeiro. The IAEA was assigned the responsibility to develop Indicators of Sustainable Development (ISD) for radioactive waste management. Among other issues, the ISD are to be developed according to the following criteria: primarily national in scale or scope; relevant to the objective of assessing progress towards sustainable development, and; dependent on data that are readily available or available at a reasonable cost to benefit ratio, adequately documented, of known quality and updated at regular intervals. (author)