NEWS
9th IMPEL General Assembly held in Copenhagen
Participants at the 9th IMPEL General Assembly
IMPEL held its 9th IMPEL General Assembly last week in the beautiful city of Copenhagen on the 07-08 June 2012.
IMPEL’s bi-annual meeting brought together representatives of 28 countries and 42 environment agencies and authorities around Europe. The group approved several new project reports:
- Development of an easy and flexible risk assessment tool as a part of the planning of environmental inspections linked to European environmental law and the RMCEI (easyTools), phase 2
- Reinforcement programme on inspection skills according to landfill sites in IMPEL member countries
- Comparison programme on the implementation and enforcement of air quality standards in relation to industrial air emissions, phase 2
- Exploring qualitative and quantitative assessment tools to evaluate the performance of environmental inspectorates across the EU
- Lessons learnt from accidents: Conference in Aix-en-Provence 2011
- Compliance assurance and company compliance management systems
- Exploring the use and effectiveness of complementary approaches to inspection for ensuring compliance
- IMPEL-TFS NCP Exchange Days 2011
- Using the IMPEL Practicability and Enforceability Checklist to assess the Waste Shipment Regulation
- Cooperation and Awareness Raising to Prevent Illegal Traffic in Waste to non-OECD countries in Asia
- IMPEL TFS-African collaboration follow up
The General Assembly progressed the development of its upcoming Multi Annual Strategic Programme 2013-15, heard speeches from the Deputy Director of the Danish EPA, OECD, the European Commission, RENA and Heads of EPAs network and also approved the applications of two new members to the network: the Swedish Agency for Marine and Water Management and Federal Office for Environment and Nature, Switzerland.
IMPEL vs NEPA / EEA football match
The General Assembly also rounded off with a friendly 5 a-side football match between the IMPEL network and the Heads of EPA network and representatives of the European Environment Agency. In a close encounter, IMPEL were just nudged out 20 goals to 17. A lot of fun was had by all as was shown by the sharing of half time oranges and a small beer together afterwards!