Activities of Aurora Green within EU project on Strategic Environmental Assessment
Under the IPA Cross-border Program 2007-2013, priority 3 – Accessibility and networks, measure 3.3 – Communication Networks, and with duration till the end of year 2015, the SPEEDY project was developed with the goal to help Member States to implement the Directive 2001/42/CE on strategic environmental assessment (SEA). This goal fits very well with the Candidate Countries/Potential Candidate Countries’ (CC/CCPs) efforts to transpose the EU Acquis in order to approximate their legislation and policies with European Standards in the environmental topic. The above objective will be achieved through the development of SEA web platform aimed to promote and extend knowledge and share information about SEA.
The first engagement of Aurora green Ltd. has been related to the activity: Activation and fulfilling of non-interactive sections of the Platform – Data Base. Aurora green Ltd. experts have activated the Shared Knowledge Platform (SKP) for Strategic Environmental Assessment by fulfilling non-interactive sections.
Activation and fulfilling of non-interactive sections of the Platform – Data Base has included a number of time-demanded activities regarding intellection, finding, explaining, translating and inserting items for SKP sub-sections, seriatim:
1. Laws/regulations: contains laws and regulations organized by administrative level (European, national, regional).
2. Guidelines: contains helpful guidelines for SEA implementation produced at different levels.
3. Good practices: lists examples of notable SEA procedures.
4. Useful links: lists on-line resources helpful to the understanding of specific SEA topics.
Thanks to the Aurora green ltd. experts’ engagement, a presence of Republic of Serbia in this thematic section is more than noticeable. In comparison to other partner states involved in the Project (Italy, Croatia and Albania), only Italy sums slightly more documents than Serbia in total, yet it is due to the fact that Italy covers EU level, as well.
Note: The Platform is still in testing phase, some contents are updated and filled ongoing.
The Platform resources link is: http://www.speedyproject.eu:8080/en_GB/risorse-della-piattaforma
The second engagement of Aurora green ltd. has been related to the activity: On-line Forums animation and moderation. So far, three on-line forums have been held, launched by the leading project partner.
The 1st on-line forum was titled: Quality Assessment of SKP (Shared Knowledge Platform). The aim was to evaluate the SKP functionality with SPEEDY partners in order to test and to validate the platform and to define an opening date of the platform to external users.
The 2nd on-line forum was titled: Dynamic Updating of the Comparative Analysis. The aim was to test stability and possibilities of the platform as a support in exchange of new and updating already collected information related to the functioning of the SEA procedure in SPEEDY partner countries and to perform a dynamic update in order to check the completeness and significance of the database created through the previous actions of the WP3.
The 3rd on-line forum was titled: Assessment Tools. The aim was to give a practical assistance highlighting possible methodologies, techniques and, when possible, open source applications, in line with the open source nature of the Platform.
Active participation and discussions of Aurora green Ltd. experts have given measurable and positive contributions to both building a strong position of Serbian leading partner in the project – Municipality of Rakovica, and thematic on-line forums’ specific aims fulfillment, and have been moved along towards giving specific contribution to transforming the Platform to an open shared knowledge space for exchanging and suggesting practical support to SEA practitioners in the Region.
The on-line forums link is: http://www.speedyproject.eu:8080/en_GB/forum-tematico