UBC Agenda 21 Event

The UBC Agenda 21 Event took place in Bützow, Germany, 12-14 October. Altogether about 50 people took part, representing member cities in almost every BSR country. The little city of Bützow (9000 inhabitants) was an excellent host and the event was very well organised.

The first part of the event was the Best City Practices (BCP) Workshop on Thursday the 12^th. Twelve good practices were presented and city couples formed for benchmarking activities on these good practices. This workshop was the first one in series of three workshops which will be organised within the BCP Project 2000-2001 (read more in the story on BCP).

On Friday the 13^th, the day was started by official opening and welcome by the Vice Mayor of Bützow, Ms Gabriele Behning, and this was followed by a presentation and an excursion of the Local Agenda 21 activities of the city. The presentation was given and the excursion planned by Dr. Mathias Alsleben, who also co-ordinated the whole event in the city. Among other things, the participants got to know where bats live in Bützow (former electricity transformer "renovated" for little animals) and how play-grounds are planned by kids - the users.

During Friday afternoon and Saturday, the UBC Local Agenda 21 Working group had its meeting which concentrated on the implementation and development of the UBC Local Agenda 21 Action Program 2000-2002. On-going projects of the program were presented and the development of these projects as well as brainstorming for new projects and activities was carried out in six workshops.

The City of Lübeck has made good progress with the Sustainable Harbour Policy Project, the Gender Equality and LA 21 Project co-ordinated by the UBC Women's Network has brought good results, the Lifestyle 2021 Project coordinated by Gotland is proceeding, and the SUFA, BCP, and MEA projects coordinated by the EnvCom are going on, too. Currently, the UBC LA 21 Action Program comprises seven active projects and ten developed project and/or activity ideas.

As one outcome of the workshops, the Latvian cities of Jelgava and Liepâja announced their willingness to conduct MEA in near future. A very interesting outcome was also the result from the Gender Equality workshop that each new project should be avaluated from the Gender point of view. The group also created a very feasible brief set of questions for this purpose, and this set was immediately put to use in the BCP Project. In fact, all the six workshops made good results, and more information on these can be obtained from the meeting memorandum, which is available for all interested from the UBC Commission on Environment Secretariat.