Documentation / Online Handbook
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| General Conclusions |
The project has shown that for every area there are many environmental ground data, held by different public or semi-public subjects such as other administrations, universities, research institutes, environmental NGO´s, meteorological services, water companies etc.. But generally this data or information are neutral, being just simple lists or data bases, comprehensible only to specialists and for specific limited use. If special systems of environmental monitoring have been created, they just provide reports corresponding to the functions of the data holding organisation. So in most cases they contain no evaluation or reference values and are also unknown to a wider public even in the administrations itself.
Therefore, a great effort in organising the environmental information for the purposes of planning and information, consists in collecting the already present data by the different holders and then activating them by correlation to the territory and evaluation. The research for already exiting data sources should always be the first step, as the monitoring and relating of new data requests is very expensive in money and time.
The resulting environmental information should not only be simple listing of data, but should elaborate a transparent evaluation and also aggregation of data in order to simplify the comprehension for non experts.
Thanks to the use of modern information systems, it is increasingly possible to aggregate and interpolate different data in order to show cause and effect interactions and to highlight them (i.e. map of the ground water sensibility to pollution, Berlin). These possibilities should be taken more into consideration in order to create effective tools being able to give precise indications and influence the further steps of planning and development on the considered territory.
There are also more ecosystemic approaches, where different media were considered as a whole and not sectorally such as the map of the Geotopes in Rome or the bioclimatic urban zones in Berlin. From our experience these aggregated indicators are very usable for planning purposes.
You will neither find a direct comparison nor a draft for a general applicable model concerning the "right way" of collecting and processing environmental information as it was postulated in the project application. During the project discussions we noticed that the specific approaches of the cities were that different depending on multiple reasons:
With this list we do not claim to be complete, but all these factors influence the demands on the conception of an Environmental Information System. We decided to point out the differences and stress on the importance of an individual analysis of the demands.
Perhaps just this consciousness became important for the quality of the produced handbook. Thanks to the heterogeneity of the partners’ situation other interested cities may profit from the variety of approaches and can use it instead of a fixed guideline to choose the right elements and to compare the experiences.
But not only because of the heterogeneity of the systems and organisational structures, but also because of the many different authors and their nationalities and cultures represented in the project we have got a very rich and differentiated handbook.
The handbook is full of first hand information collected, in addition to the everyday work by the members from the editing group, directly from the competent specialists and administrators. By preparing this handbook normally existing borders between different departments and levels in the administration have been crossed in all partner cities. So many specialists contributed to this handbook that unfortunately we cannot name them here but only thank them for the co-operation and the additional work.
Last but not least remains the question: How do Environmental Information Systems support political decision making, environmental planning and reporting? The discussions during the project lead to the consensus that they influence and support it. But how and how much could not be measured during this project.
Outlook
In the framework of the ENVIBASE project a network of municipalities has been already established and respective knowledge has been gained. These should not be wasted. The advent of the association of the Central and Eastern European Countries to the EU would be an opportunity to extend the acquired experience to these countries and create functional links between geographically distant areas of Europe supporting other on-going regional, national and European activities.
The ENVIBASE project did focus on the international exchange of experience in the field of Environmental Information Systems. This exchange was mainly organised in five workshops where specialists from the participating municipalities presented their work, methods and results in detail. During these workshops the results were discussed and as far as possible compared. The presentations should be made comparable with the same structure for every city.
Modular ENVIBASE II
The existing network of cities formed by the ENVIBASE project should be used as a forum for the discussion of the requirements to improve the existing EIS in a probable follow-up project ENVIBASE II. But from the experience of the first project, the main aim should now return to the definition and improvement of the specific regional and local tasks of the respective municipalities. Using the gained knowledge and experience of discussions on the international level this now should be implemented in the regions in the follow-up project. Small projects can be defined in order to apply these requirements partially. Each city could implement one of the topics below in a partial project in collaboration with their specific local partners e.g. software companies to provide the local networks. The platform of the project then would give an opportunity for the synthesis and for the discussion of the experiences. As a result there could be common components and functions usable by all partners. This makes sense from the economic point of view and will also lead to synergetic effects caused by the summarised experience of several partners as well as the different levels of the partners.
The latest developments of information technology and the new data exchange system will reduce the cost and the effort of having a centralised data collection in future. The development of interface-tools to directly elaborate, evaluate, allow access and present the data held at source have shown to be simpler, especially for updating.
This development may in the end allow to realise Environmental Information and Monitoring Systems with extended capacities as:
The comprehensive theme should be the "Improvement of the functionality and the accessibility of Environmental Information Systems" (as an instrument for the implementation of sustainable regional and local policies in the 21st century). Inside of this each city will work out a specific module. This will be defined on a local level.
The modules could be:
1. collecting of environmental data
2. maintenance of the database
3. assessment and evaluation/development of indicators and models
4. optimisation of the instruments and the accessibility
5. analysis of the user requirements/mechanisms of decision making