Sharing What We Learn
BE-AWARE will provide an area-wide risk assessment of marine pollution (mineral oil and hazardous and noxious substances) allowing for the first time risk to be mapped across the region. It is important that stakeholders, such as Bonn Agreement Contracting Parties, the EU, other regional Agreements, industry and NGOs, have confidence in these project outcomes. Therefore BE-AWARE involved stakeholders at key stages throughout the project. These included the kick-off meeting, method seminar, risk assessment seminar and the final conference where key decisions on issues such as the methodology used and outputs to be disseminated were made.
The Kick-off Meeting set the scene for the project, communicating to stakeholders the aims and objectives to be achieved over the 2 years (2012-2013), highlighting the EU’s (DG ECHO) reasons for funding the project and how it could contribute to EU Policy.
The Method Seminar considered both the data required to undertake the risk assessments and how the methodology developed for the BRISK project could be adapted for the North Sea Region whilst allowing the results to be compatible.
The Risk Assessment Seminar occured at the halfway point in the project and reviewed the progress on tasks such as the regional resource database (data), methodology, traffic and use study and environmental and socioeconomic sensitivity criteria before the risk assessment process itself started identifying any problems or gaps.
The workshop established common criteria and qualitative descriptors to measure the potential impact of mineral oil and hazardous and noxious substances pollution upon the coastline of the Bonn Agreement area.
The Final Conference disseminated the project results to stakeholders highlighting any implications of the results and presenting any options for future work.