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COMMON FORUM NEWS NR. 9

By Joop | April 21, 2006

Dear All
In a recent visit to Brussels I had a talk whith Claudia Olazabal, member of the soil team of DGENV. Her expectations were that the Soil strategy communication and the proposal for a Soil framework directive could be published in May 2006. There were some internal discussions within the commission causing delays but these problems are likely to be solved. She also pointed out that the text of the proposed directive has changed significantly due to input from the legal sevices from the commission. So if everything is on schedule we will be able to discuss the proposals of the commission in the COMMON FORUM meeting in Budapest in June.
After publication the EU soil policy discussion will enter a next phase. For this phase COMMON FORUM is considered by the commission as a valuable platform for consultation concerning soil contamination. It is important that we continue our activities and try to find new members so that we can “cover ” EU 25 if possible. I am currently trying to get contact with colleagues from the EU memberstates missing in COMMON FORUM.

*Please note that I will be away from 24/04 till 14/05 and my not reply immediately to emails. On 11 and 12 May I will be in Carcassonne to attend the NICOLE workshop.*

1] COMMONFORUM.EU
During the recent rush on EU internet domain names I managed to get a registration for Commonforum.eu
I will use this domain to create a small website for COMMON FORUM communication ( who is who, members and guests, common forum news, ect). I will inform you as soon as the site is operational.

2] COMMON FORUM MEETING IN BUDAPEST 8&9 JUNE
If the commission indeed publishes the proposal we will have Claudia Olazabal at the meeting to present and explain the proposals. Together with the discussion about ” national inventories of contaminated sites” this will be a quite interesting and heavy agenda. The Dutch consultant Frans Mulder who produced the report about the methodology underlying the Dutch inventory will present this work at our meeting, as a start for an in depth COMMON FORUM discussion. He also presented this work at DGENV in Brussel and this was a big success and raised many discussion points.

The COMMON FORUM meeting will take place in Budapest, Fő utca 44-50. This is the address of the Ministry of Environment and Water. The meeting room will be on the 7nd floor and there will be two smaller rooms on afternoon of june 8th for group discussions. The Ministry is on the Buda side of the Danube-bank neer the “Batthyany” square. Gabor Haznos will provide us with additional information about travel and hotels.
You will receive the final meeting agenda in the third week of May

3] A QUESTION FROM NICOLE
Our industrial sister network NICOLE is ( of course) very interested in the way the EU liability directive will be implemented in EU memberstates. The EU Liability Directive is now in force and needs to be implemented on country level before April 2007.
The NICOLE members do not have a clear picture what the status is of the implementation per country.
Would the common forum members be able to indicate:
-What the status is in their country?
-Which governmental department(s) in their country are involved in this implementation process?
-Who our members could contact to get more detailed information?

I suggest that the country representatives within COMMON FORUM could mail the answers to the questions above to the NICOLE representative in COMMON FORUM: Marc van Gijzel (Corporate Operational Excellence Royal Vopak) email: marc.van.gijzel@vopak.com
NICOLE does not expect very lengthy answers, short info is enough especially if the question about where to get additional information is answered.

4] EUGRIS
As EUGRIS wants to keep the discussion alive about the relation with COMMON FORUM, Paul Bardos prepared a presentation which he wants to share with us. As the powerpoint file is quite bulky I attached a Zip archive containing the slides as jpg files. [attachment too big to be included here]. Unfortunately he is not able to come to Budapest to discuss these matters further. COMMON FORUM already briefly discussed the EUGRIS questions at the NICOLE workshop in Sardinia, but in view of the small number of participants it is worthwhile to put EUGRIS on the agenda again for Budapest

4] OTHER NEWS:
*Nicole workshop report*
Report of the NICOLE workshop in Cagliari, ” The impact of EU Directives on the management of Contaminated Land” . For those of you who could not attend the workshop, please find final report at the NICOLE website: http://www.nicole.org

*EU coordination action RISKBASE*
The coordination RISKBASE is accepted and will be funded under EU 6th frameworkprogramme. RISKBASE wants to bring together results of AQUATERRA and many other projects in the field of land- sediment- and water- management to analyse how far we got in our understanding of these systems in view of risk based land (and water) management. The kick off meeting will be in September 2006

*AQUATERRA, what next ?*
The AQUATERRA annual meeting took place in Tuebingen ( Germany), 11 and 12 April. AQUATERRA, studying diffuse pollution in the soil and water systems, is addressing the grand picture at the riverbasin scale and mainly agricultural and natural soils ( fortunately still the majority). Integration of subprojects whithin AQUATERRA improved significantly and I feel that the partners of the quite large AQUATERRA consortium have now a much clearer view on the common goals in AQUATERRA. To a very large extent AQUATERRA is still a “natural sciences” project. The upcoming FP 6 project RISK BASE will address the management issues. Considering this there still is a gap concerning urban soils. As you may know a huge urbanisation is expected in the EU in the next decades which may force us to consider other ecological services of these soils than only the support of buildings and roads. There is also a clear link with contamination and sealing. There is a need for an (FP 7 ?) project on urban soil environments to provide EU with the necessary knowledge to assure ’sustainable’ urbanisation from the soil and water point of view. Such a project could complement the AQUATERRA and make use of the management concepts which will be developed by RISK BASE. I wonder whether there are any initiatives in the EU memberstates to formulate research proposals in this area. If there are please inform me.

5] MY MAIN QUESTIONS:
a)Please try to answer the questions from NICOLE and mail them to Marc van Gijzel
b) Do you know any research initiatives concerning ‘Urban soils, including ecological aspects”
Best regards,
Joop Vegter

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