SOER 2010 country assessments. Lessons learned and the way forward – a country perspective Conference ‘Sharing Environmental InformationJan Hendrik Voet

2 About Belgium

3 About Belgium & environment Federal state with three communities and three regions Look at Country profileCountry 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

4 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

5 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

6 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

7 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

8 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

9 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

10 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

11 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

12 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

13 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?