GEMET, the GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, has been developed as an indexing, retrieval and control tool for the European Topic Centre on Catalogue of Data Sources (ETC/CDS) and the European Environment Agency (EEA), Copenhagen. The work has been carried out through a contract between the EEA and the ETC/CDS which is led by the Ministry of the Environment of Lower Saxony, includes members of Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden and benefits of the collaboration of other member countries of the European Union (EU), as well as of UNEP Infoterra.

The basic idea for the development of GEMET was to use the best of the presently available excellent multilingual thesauri, in order to save time, energy and funds. GEMET was conceived as a “general” thesaurus, aimed to define a common general language, a core of general terminology for the environment. Specific thesauri and descriptor systems (e.g. on Nature Conservation, on Wastes, on Energy, etc.) have been excluded from the first step of development of the thesaurus and have been taken into account only for their structure and upper level terminology.