TARTU AGENDA 21 WON FIRST
UBC ENVIRONMENTAL AWARD

Rostock, Šiauliai, Sundsvall, and Växjö. The three key guidelines of the evaluation by the Award Committee were: beneficialness to the whole local community, innovativeness, and consideration of local circumstances.
The 15 applications covered a wide range of environmental practice -e. g. from specific projects to participatory processes and from smaller local projects to broad-scaled projects with global environmental perspectives. The differences of practice and methodology, and the fact that most of the applications were really good, implied that the task of the Award Committee was not an easy one.
In addition to the winner, the committee wanted to express its special favourable comments to the following practices: Elblag for its well targeted practical Local Agenda 21 activities, which are an excellent example of implementing bottomup approaches; Sundsvall for its innovative and quite unique approach to include working places in the sustainable development process, and Växjö for excellently demonstrating in practice how renewable energy can be used.

Award ceremony at Stockholm City Hall

Among 15 excellent applications, the Award Committee unanimously chose the Local Agenda 21 of the City of Tartu as the winner of the first Best Environmental Practice in Baltic Cities Award. The winner was announced 25 September at the award ceremony in the Town Hall of Stockholm, on the occasion of the Lunch Reception of the V General Conference.
The Award Committee underlined that the participation in the Agenda 21 process in Tartu has been broad - all parts of the municipality, many

other stakeholders and ordinary citizens have participated, and the schools and teachers have been active. A lot of information has been reported and an environmental information system that makes information available for public participation has been created. Furthermore, Tartu Agenda 21 has in many ways been linked to regional, national and international Agenda 21 processes.
According to the report of the Award Committee, the inter-sectorial process with a broad participation that has been implemented during the work is important. There are a lot of cornerstones for the future in terms of high awareness and skills. All partners and also ordinary citizens of Tartu will have improved capacities for bringing about a sustainable future.
Other cities that applied for the award were: Bützow, Elblag, Gdynia, Gotland, Kaunas, Kolding, Lahti, Norrköping, Panevėžys, Pori,

COOPERATION WITH TAIEX

practices and experience from the Nordic EU Member States were presented in a "from colleague to colleague" form of way. Some of the UBC member cities were participating with speakers. This is a way for the Commission on Environment to serve UBC's member cities as well as function as a consultative body in the region. At the same time, the ongoing Municipal Environment Auditing (MEA) project, was brought up and results disseminated. The subject of these two-days seminars was narrowed down to water protection and waste management. Possibly other subjects will be taken under consideration for future seminars with the experience of the ones now being organised.

During the autumn UBC Commission on Environment had planned three seminars on application and enforcement of European Community environmental legislation at sub-national level in the Baltic States. The seminars, that were held on 16-17 November in Kaunas, Lithuania, 30 November -1 December in Jurmala, Latvia and 7-8 December in Tartu, Estonia, were co-organised together with the European Commission's Technical Assistance Information Exchange Office (TAIEX) and local organisers.
European Commission's interest in financing these seminars is that they prepare civil servants of the accession countries for the oncoming changes when implementing the EC environmental legislation. Another reason, as important as the first one, is that information has to be exchanged also in the other direction. For the 

European Union to make a trustworthy approach to improving the environment situation in the Baltic States, it has to have a thorough knowledge of the conditions in this area, legislative, administrative, technical, practical and financial factors that have to be dealt with. The European Council is believed to move forward in the accession discussions with these three countries at the Helsinki European Council in December. Eventually it is time for the Baltic States to choose their path, inside or outside the European Union. It should not be the role of the UBC to influence their decisions but to assist in the approximation process if they choose to join the EU.
Thanks to UBC's wide and well working network in the Baltic Sea Region we were approached with this task. In addition to expertise from TAIEX and the environment ministries of the Baltic States, best