Inspection planning tool of nature protected sites

Project description and aims

The alarming decline in Europe’s biodiversity has driven the adoption, by the European Union (EU) of two key pieces of legislation – the Habitats and Birds Directives – to conserve Europe’s most valuable species and habitats across their entire natural range within the EU.

The Action Plan for nature, people and the economy COM(2017)198 points out that key factors behind the shortcomings in the implementation of the Nature Directives are e.g. “limited resources, weak enforcement, poor integration of nature objectives into other policy areas, insufficient knowledge and access to data.” The development of an IT tool as a part of the planning of inspections of nature protected sites will provide a systematic approach which would maximize resources into key areas of concern.

The project aims the development of an easy and flexible tool as a part of the planning of inspections of Natura 2000 sites linked to European environmental law and the RMCEI. The objective is testing and improving the proposed NIRAM-Tool in different IMPEL member countries.

In 2018 a first version of the tool has been developed. Based on the information about the IRAM tool for planning inspections of industrial installations the work was carried out in three phases:

• Development of appropriate criteria and a scoring system.
• Transposition of the proposal into the IRAM tool (result: the so called NIRAM tool).
• Determination of the inspection frequencies of selected examples (existing sites in some member countries)

In 2019 the applicability of the proposed criteria and the tool were confirmed / substantiated through tests and practical work with them in Slovenia.

In 2020 / 2021 further work on gathering feedback from users and identify needs for improvement and further recommendations for the tool as well as training material for NIRAM administrators, coordinators and inspectors will be carried out.

Related files/information

• Habitats Directive, Council Directive 92/43/EEC of 21 May 1992.
• Birds Directive, Directive 2009/147/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 30 November 2009.
• Action Plan for nature, people and the economy COM(2017)198.
• Environmental Compliance Assurance – EU Action Plan