The first regional steering committee met in Brussels, Belgium on 29-30 November 2016. The committee discussed national and regional priorities and plans for 2017.

Meeting attendees included NFPs from the six partner countries, EC DG NEAR, DG ENV, Eurostat, the EU Slovak Presidency, OECD, UNECE, UNEP, Zoi Environment Network, REC Caucasus, Eco Forum and EEA colleagues.  

The objectives of the first ENI SEIS II EAST steering committee meeting were as follows:

• agree on the regional priorities to be addressed by the project i.e. the thematic clusters and their associated objectives/approaches;
• take stock of the findings and country level discussions during the project inception phase;
• discuss the proposed elements of the national work plans and activities to be initiated in 2017, on the one hand, and those to tae place during project implementation (i.e. by 2020) on the other;
• ensure synergies with other relevant regional and national projects/initiatives, with support from EU Delegations, UN bodies or bilateral programmes.

The following actions/ideas would be considered in the next project phase:

• clarify the targets and deliverables for SEIS (“establishing SEIS by 2021” across the pan-European region”) vis-a-vis the SEIS II project (2016-2020 period);

• follow developments around SDGs which underpin further work on indicators at national and regional levels;

• identify and maintain links with other regional projects (EUWI+, EaP Green, EMBLAS II) and Global Environment Outlook (GEO) process;

• identify examples of national practices or pilots that can be replicated.

Outcomes

One important conclusion is the need to further define and agree targets and deliverables for the SEIS II project in line with the targets to “have SEIS established by 2021” (as stated in the June 2016 Batumi Declaration).  This work must also consider the wider SDGs framework, which is relevant for all countries.

To address the “cooperation” dimension, the establishment of “SEIS national implementation teams (NITs)” is essential. The teams will facilitate communication between the institutions and promote projects' outputs. A priority area will be to ensure that adequate data policies and inter-institutional agreements are in place to allow the full operationalisation of the national integrated information systems.

Targets for the “content” dimension focus on the production of the full set of agreed environmental indicators, where links between different indicator processes, which cover the UNECE Environmental Indicators,  the OECD Green Growth Indicators and the SDGs are made to simplify processes to the benefit of the partner countries. Furthermore, more harmonisation is needed between the methodologies used by Eionet and the EEA, and the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) and the and UN Framework for the Development of Environmental Statistics (FDES). The proposed thematic will be on water (water quantity and quality), biodiversity (linked to the establishment of the Emerald Network) and air (related to the EU Air Quality Directive and other synergy activities). A common pilot project will implement the CLC methodology and land cover change for six urban areas.

The “infrastructure” will focus on the concepts of European environmental knowledge platforms, such as the Water Information System for Europe (WISE) and the Biodiversity Information System for Europe (BISE) to develop regional and national actions leading to similar types of systems at the country level. It is important to recognise that knowledge platforms such as WISE and BISE are also partnerships (among several stakeholders), portals (providing data, environmental statistics, indicators, information on policies etc.) and processes (providing services to meet reporting obligations).