(Brussels, 18-20 November)

• Downloads
• Photo gallery

The 1st Environment Forum Annual Meeting was held on 19th and 20th November 2009, at Hotel Holiday Inn Brussels City Centre. A total number of 18 NGOs representatives coming from all the countries covered by the project as well as relevant EC personnel from DG ENV and DG ENLARG participated to the meeting.

The activities of the meeting were divided into 3 types of sessions:

1. NGO SESSIONS
2. THEMATIC SESSIONS
3. INFORMATIVE SESSIONS

• provide space for the NGOs self-organizing and formulating inputs into the discussions with the EC;
• serve as space for discussing technical aspects of the Environment Forum, critical feedback and management improvement;
• provide time for high level debate between NGOs and the EC (e.g., meeting with DG ENV Commissioner).

• Two thematic areas/themes (Waste management and IPPC) have been identified prior to the meeting by the project team. These should represent themes where NGOs see most of the problems at the present state of the enlargement and/or where they need more information and inputs from the Commission;
• The current situation of these 2 themes at both the EU and national levels is summarised prior to the meeting through the preparation of Thematic papers;
• Thematic sessions are then organized within the framework of the annual meeting and will address EC perspectives on the themes and NGOs concerns.

• One of the key elements of the annual meeting is to brief NGOs on the EU enlargement process and provide them with state of the art information on different aspects of the process (e.g., regional/national progress, stages of the acquis implementation, problems and challenges ahead);
• The sessions also provide NGOs with information on what are the “hot” issues in the EU policy formulation and implementation, what is in the pipelines and what are the challenges ahead (not only for the EU member states, but also for candidate countries).

A “start-up” half-day preparatory meeting on 18th November afternoon also took place. The aims of organising such preparatory event were to:

• introduce Environment Forum, the project team and participating NGOs to each other
• explain in detail planned activities and time line to the NGOs
• map out expectations of NGOs from the project, and outline the basic rules and principles according to which our cooperation will work.