During the Interregional meeting, partners have presented the selection of good practices available in their Regions/Countries and have discussed about the pros and cons of some of these practices.
This phase of the learning process has highlighted some interesting aspects:
- Stakeholders have a different consideration of the regulatory reliefs and incentives depending if they are an enforcement authority, a regulator, an EMAS Competent Body or a private company (the beneficiary of the incentive).
- Some incentives are not having he expected impact as in certain cases its implementation depends on an authority different from the one that has promoted it thus reducing the effectiveness of the incentive.
- Besides regulatory reliefs there can be other activities that can help the creation of an “EMAS community”.
- It’ll be interesting to be able to suggest some proposals to be included in the EU legal framework in order to facilitate the transposition at MS and regional level.
- Certain regulators/enforcement authorities do not rely on EMAS, partially because they do not have a real knowledge on the verification process.
- It could be interesting to explore potential interactions between the EMAS verifier and the inspectors of enforcement authorities.
- Partners can also learn from the worst experiences.
- Along the development of the Regional study it could be interesting to group the incentives accordingly to the target group or other helpful criteria in order to better define the future action plan.
In relation to the 2nd project meeting, the partners have welcomed the Austrian Environmental Agency that is actually substituting the Austrian Ministry of Environment. The change will not affect the results of the project as the Agency and the Ministry will closely collaborate – one as partner and the second one as a stakeholder, and both, the policy instrument and the geographical scope will be the same.
