Improved Environmental Management System

The project Managing Urban Europe-25 (MUE-25) aims at developing an environmental management system that addresses sustainable development in the whole functional urban area. Only very few cities in the world have been able to achieve this goal by applying the existing systems.

The project Managing Urban Europe-25, which is co-ordinated by the Commission on Environment, started in March 2005. The project is contributing to fulfil the UBC Agenda 21 Action programme 2004-2009-Roadmap for Sustainable Baltic Cities, in which one of the focus areas is good governance and sustainable urban management. The goals of the project are also closely linked to the Thematic Strategy on the Urban Environment within the VI Environmental Action Plan of the European Union.

MUE-25 will elaborate and test an integrated, community based, practical and efficient management system for local governments. This system will also include more sustainable development dimensions than just the environmental ones. All 23 partners gathered for the first time at the kick-off meeting in Riga, Latvia, June 13-15. The meeting was a key event in mobilising all project partners and motivating them for implementation and strengthening their commitment. The project partners had a chance to express their needs and expectations towards the project and exchange experiences of previous work on environmental management systems. Strategic and methodological approaches of the project were discussed to reach understanding and consensus on the basic concepts.

The 14 project partner cities play an important role in the project as they should both provide information on successes and failures so far and carry out testing of the framework model to be developed in the project. During summer and beginning of autumn all partner cities have completed a questionnaire which aimed to develop understanding of the environmental management issues in the cities. The experience gained from the cities will be compared and evaluated to identify the most effective means of securing local sustainability management in relation to different administrative contexts. These experiences combined with further research activities will enable the development of an improved model on environmental management system. The model will be proposed to the MUE-25 Strategic Committee at the meeting in Siena, Italy, October 26-27. The actual testing phase of the model in the cities will start during 2006. The methods, toolkits and training material developed in the project will be available for other cities in EU-25 as well.