"Better Regulation and Outcomes for the Environment" conference, 19th March 2007, Brussels

This page contains the presentations and recordings of speeches from the conference "Better Regulation and Outcomes for the Environment". The conference gathered 130 senior officials from Member States and European Institutions with Members of the European Parliament.

• Agenda (pdf ~15K)
• List of registered participants (pdf ~68K)

The conference's aim was to agree on the outcomes sought from better regulation in the area of environment policy and to consider the concrete steps that all parties involved in policy design and implementation could take to bring about those outcomes. It heard different perspectives on better regulation for environment policy and examples of what this can mean in practice. In particular it discussed:

• What outcomes should Better Regulation deliver?
• What can each organisation do to bring about better outcomes from policy?
• At what stages of the policy process – from before the Commission proposal to enforcement – can different organisations make a change?
• What concrete steps can be taken to achieve the European Council target of a 25% reduction in administrative burden from European policy?

The European Commission is collecting together the suggestions made in the conference on concrete steps that can be made by all parties to bring about better outcomes from policy and achieve the 25% reduction target.
Please send additional suggestions for actions to christian.hudson@ec.europa.eu

Recording of the conference (zip file ~45MB) including an index showing the times that different speakers started

Chair's summary of the day and Timo Makela on Next Steps (pdf ~23K)

Speeches and Presentations:

• Summary of first session speeches (pdf ~25K)
• Patrick ten Brink (pdf ~536K)
• Piet Jonker (pdf ~87K)
• Timo Makela (pdf ~99K)
• Marianne Wenning (pdf ~75K)
• Barbara Young (pdf ~277K)

Conference Documents:

1. "Better Regulation. Helping us Make a Better Environment" (pdf ~89K) - a paper sent by Commissioner Dimas to President Barroso in January 2007
2. "Barriers to Good Environmental Regulation" (pdf ~90K) produced by the Network of European Environment Protection Agencies, January 2007
3. The short IMPEL "Checklist for assessing practicability and enforcement of legislation" (pdf ~104K), adopted in December 2006, together with the recommendations from the related IMPEL project.
   The full report on the objectives and benefits of this checklist (pdf ~327K)
4. A summary of the project "Improving Assessment of Environment in Impact Assessment" (pdf ~72K), January 2007. The full report is available at http://www.ecologic-events.de/eu-impact-assessment/en/documents/Env_in_IA_final.pdf