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?