Managing Urban Europe - 25

The largest European project so far on cities' environmental management systems (EMS) has just been started. This project, coordinated by the UBC, is developing the next generation of EMS to address sustainable development in the whole functional urban area.

The goal of extendingthe environmental management system to address the whole functional urban area is an extremely ambitious one. Only very few cities in the world have so far been able to achieve this by applying the existing systems. As work on environmental management systems at cities has been on-going already for more than a decade, it is indeed time to take a closer and critical look at the systems themselves and on the ways how they have been implemented in the cities.

MUE-25 project starts exactly by doing that. During the current year, the project will investigate and analyze the success of EMS applications in European cities. On basis of that, the development needs should be found out. Once the needs start to be revealed, further development of both the existing systems and the methods of their implementation will be carried out.

The cities play an extremely important role in the project, as they should both provide information on successes and failures so far, and carry out testing of the new solutions to be developed in the project. Utilizing this practical test and further developing the methods based on it, the MUE-25 project should be able by the beginning of 2008 to propose an improved system and implementation methodology to be used potentially in all cities of Europe. This system will address the whole functional urban area of the city and it will also include more sustainable development dimensions that just the environmental one.

The goals of the project are closely linked to the Thematic Strategy on the Urban Environment within the EU 6th Environmental Action Plan and co-funded by EC DG Environment. The project has altogether 23 partners, including 14 cities from all over Europe. Seven UBC member cities are in the Project Steering Group and all other UBC members will receive the methodological and information materials developed by the project.