A small delegation of IMPEL attended the international conference hosted by the Australasian Environmental Law Enforcement and Regulators Network (AELERT) and the International Network for Environmental Compliance and Enforcement (INECE).
For the first time, INECE and AELERT decided to join forces to examine and push the limits of the Conference theme: “Environmental Collaboration: Shaping the future of regulation, compliance and enforcement together.” This collaboration opens up numerous opportunities for environmental regulators to cooperate and build capacity across regions, jurisdictions and organisations.
From 10-13 March 2020 this international conference was held in Adelaide, Australia. IMPEL was invited to attend. Overall, more than 300 participants from over 30 countries joined the event.
IMPEL joined the regional networks discussion panel in the opening plenary session. Subsequently, in the course of the conference, IMPEL was presented in one of the subsessions. Also, IMPEL participated in a workshop on the future of regional and global networks. The IMPEL Integrated Water Approach project was presented in a poster with the outcomes and methodologies developed on the first two phases of the project (2017-2018).
*) Henk Ruessink of IMPEL presenting
The conference covered the main topics of environmental compliance, such as water, waste, air, noise and wildlife. Besides being an international conference, many of the presentations referred to the Australian context. This aspect allowed the participants to realise that despite being a single country, the environmental law and its compliance rules are often quite different from state to state and transboundary issues, such as water management, present real challenges that need to be tackled. The existence of the Australasian AELERT network, that promotes knowledge and best practices exchanges, reveals to be a crucial element to encourage and share better approaches to protect environment and to implement and enforce environmental legislation.
From this observation it was possible to explain that regions with common legislative baselines in place, like in the European Union, represent a different starting point. The exchange of experiences between all networks offers a useful approach towards mutual learning from different situations and circumstances.
In connection to this, INECE expressed the ambition to strengthen its role as a global umbrella network. Facilitating connections between networks to address specific and universal challenges of networks, would be an important goal for INECE.
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