Post on 20-Jan-2018
description
SOER 2010 country assessments. Lessons learned and the way forward
– a country perspective
Conference ‘Sharing Environmental Information Jan Hendrik Voet
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About Belgium
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About Belgium & environment
• Federal state with three communities and three regions• Look at Country profile• Environment is mainly a regional competence
without federal supervision• Some federal environmental (& related) activities • Separate environmental policies and networks• Independent ‘state of the environment’ processes and
reports in each region
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Belgium and beyond
• Belgian environmental co-ordination through collaboration agreements• Interregional Cell for the Environment (National Focal
Point for EEA & EIONET) • Coordination Committee on International
Environmental Policy’• Collaboration on packaging waste – climate change –
biodiversity –health - ...• For national and international use• Format: small physical administrative units or
traditional working groups
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Belgium and SOER Part C
• Belgian indicator working group• Representatives from the different networks including
regional soer-processes• Task:
• follow-up of international indicator developments• informaton exchange between entities• 2009: SOER 2010 and specifically elaboration of part C
• NFP was soer2010-coordinator• > 10 meetings• > 10 experts directly involved• Belgian presidency made resources available
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Common evironmental themes
• Make use as much as possible of existing authoritative and official information
• Criteria for selection of issues/indicators• Interest and availability of information across regions • Link to international indicators sets(CSI – SDI)• Possibility to tell a story across DPSIR-chain• Potential to tell an integrated Belgian story• Include information about regional specificity• ...
• Take into account webbased endproduct • Work immediately in English
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National and regional stories
• Each political entity selected a theme according to its own free choise• Brussels: indoor pollution• Flanders: transport• Wallonia: river contracts• Federal: pesticides
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SENSE
• Shared European and National State of the Environment information
• Active involvement in project and membership of SENSE Task Force
• Scenario 1• Discussion with regional soer responsibles to
investigate (web) capacities• Development of NFP website to host Belgian
soer contribution
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Evaluation (general)
• Qualitative process communication, guideliness and language check
• Inconsistency between amount of requested information and length restrictions
• As usual level of ambition not realistic • Delays from both sides• Flexible and constructive attitude from both
sides• Heavy exercise requiring a lot of resources
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Evaluation (Belgium)
• Positive contribution from the Belgian experts (Presidency? – strong EIONET?)
• Good mix between integrated national and regional information
• Experts learned a lot from eachother• Writing for web or (paper) report is different• Authoritative and official information in existing reports
was used but gradually updated during process: gives most recent information but also danger of inconsistency and is labour intensive
• Automatic update of information should be possible
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From 2010 to 2015
• Such a bad experience never again (?)• Continous free non-streamlined update (?)• Impossible to allocate the same amount of resources each
year (!)• Take some time for the final evalution and next steps
• first read and analyse contributions from different countries
• monitor comments outsiders• analyse (capacity) differences between countries • what is the added value?
• Keep the momentum and decide about update procedure early 2011
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Update possibilities (1)
• Add new themes such as health, soil, ...• Add new indicators within a theme• Update one or more themes• Update a question within a theme (forward
looking?)• ...• Combination of above• Must be sustainable and realistic
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Update possibilities (2)
• Make an inventory and analysis of the indicators/issues selected (and why) by the countries and this for the common themes and the specific national stories
• The outcome of this exercise could give information about a limited (50?) number of indicators/issues for which a regular update could be performed by countries at least if this can be done automatically based on existing information on the web
• Could be linked to international indicator sets
Shared European and National State of the Environment information?