This paper reviews the applications of NOAA-AVHRR 1 km data for environmental monitoring. This topic is very significant in view of the development of 1 km global datasets. Research papers reviewed herein largely describe application of AVHRR data for North America, Sahelian Africa and tropical forests of both Africa and South America. All 5 AVHRR bands have found some level of use for land-cover studies. However, the majority of the land characterization research papers used AVHRR/ NDVI as the main data source. Multi-temporal NDVI datasets have found wide use to describe vegetation phenology. AVHRR thermal bands have also been employed by a number of researchers for both surface temperature mapping and for land-cover discrimination especially in tropical rain forests. The most common data analysis techniques employed in these papers were regressions between bands and supervised classification procedures. The review indicated that land-cover mapping and direct estimation of land-cover parameters using AVHRR data is still at an early stage of development. Applications of AVHRR data for these purposes, however, are likely to increase with the availability of I km standard products.