Before the last day of the week long partnership meeting, ENV.net partners relaxed taking a nostalgic ride around Milan. The partnership meeting involved a Training for Trainers and a training on Social Media use in addition to the general evaluation of 2013 activities with a potential road map for 2014.
Today ENV.net team attended a webinar on the use of social networks for ENV.net action, organised by Claudia Vago.
This event was preceded by a study on the use of internet and social media in ENV.net countries and by the partners themselves prepared by the same consultant (see ENV.net – Where we are)
It was a great opportunity to improve ENV.net capacity to better communicate our messages by using these media. Apart from facebook, which is already known by almost of us, we discovered storify, which allows you to create stories, by combining news from twitter, instagram, flickr, you tube and other social media, and to publish them on the website. Very nice! We will use it soon in ENV.net website…
Moreover we discovered the importance of having an hashtag as a means of grouping ENV.net messages, so that one can search for the hashtag and get the set of messages that contain it. Try our #envnet !
Then we also find out the way to scheduling posts in facebook (but also in other social media), through the amazing bufferapp.
ENV.net team will continue to work on these tools to find out the best ways to communicate with people, to spread the world, to networking….
Would you like to join us?
On October 18th, ENV.net partner EASD participated to the presentation of Serbia Progress Report 2013 organised by the EU Delegation in Serbia. The presentation, focusing on economic chapters, was followed by a discussion with CSOs representatives.
Environmental chapter had a great attention in the discussion. The main conclusion of this discussion is that there are a lot of challenges for candidate countries in this sector (see EU Enlargement Factsheets – Energy, Climate Change and Environment), and little progresses achieved.
However, the EC conclusion is, in some relevant segments, different from the ENV.net Study conducted in June 2013. ENV.net study
ENV.net Serbia Team prepared a useful tool: ENV.net reading progress report SERBIA.
[alert style=”white”] Some background information for SERBIA
Candidate – applied in 2009, obtained candidate status in March 2012. The EU-facilitated dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina was launched in March 2011. The First agreement of principles governing normalisation of relations was reached with Kosovo in April 2013. The momentum of reforms has also been reinvigorated in Serbia. The European Council decided in June 2013 to open accession negotiations. The first Intergovernmental Conference on Serbia’s accession negotiations will be held in January 2014 at the very latest, after the Council adopts the negotiating framework, which was proposed by the Commission in July 2013. In the meantime, the ‘screening’ began in September 2013. The Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA) entered into force on 1 September.
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More than 120 participants were present at EnE13 conference/ENV.net Roundatable organized by the Environmental Ambassadors for Sustainable Development on the 10th of June, 2013 in Belgrade, Serbia (see the presentation here). The main messages of this event were that environmental sector activities should be knowledge-based and that education for environment and sustainable development should be a priority. Capacities and continuity are very important for inclusion of environment in other sectoral policies.
This conference was institutionally supported by the Ministry of Energy, Development and Environmental Protection and the Ministry of Natural Resources, Mining and Spatial Planning, as well as National Commision for UNESCO.
During the conference the national coordinator of the ENV.net project for Serbia, presented the results of the questionnaire conducted during the inception phase of the project (see ENV.net survey summary Serbia).
On 21st-22nd May 2013,ENV.net partners organised a meeting in Belgrade before the Inception conference to discuss about the activities implemented during the inception phase, agree on the strategy and the workplan up to the end of the 2-year phase of the project, and prepare the presentation of the ENV.net to the EC Inception conference.
During this meeting there was also the opportunity to talk about and agree on the structure of this ENV.net website to which all ENV.net partners will contribute with relevant contents.
On the 22nd and 23rd of January, just after the kick-off conference, the ENV.net members met in EEB office in Brussels for the 1st partnership meeting. This event was crucial for the creation of the project steering committee, the identification of each organisation’s strengths and added value for the project purpose and the definition of a detailed work-plan for the project inception phase.
During the meeting an information session on the environment acquis was organised by EEB staff for the benefit of ENV.net members. It was quite interesting as it provided an insider view from an organization (EEB) that is really active and experienced in this area. While explaining all 10 chapters of Environmental acquis, project partners were interested to understand the EU priorities. It was agreed that nature protection, horizontal legislation and climate change chapters vested the higher relevance, at the moment, with regard of the all EU countries. This seems due to several reasons. Among them: the non fulfilment of standards even by EU countries and the absolute need to increase further implementation and monitoring for these themes.
During the meeting an information session on EC administrative requirements was delivered by punto.sud and financial guidelines were distributed to partners for the project management. Finally MoUs between punto.sud and the 5 partners were signed.