Regional Working Group on Environment

The Regional Working Group on Environment (RWGE) was established by the Barents Regional Council in 1993. After a reconstruction of the working groups under the Regional Council, the RWGE was re-established during the spring of 2001 as one of five regional working groups. The county of Västerbotten in Sweden assumed the chairmanship of the working group. The 13 member counties in the Barents Region and the indigenous peoples have one representative each in the RWGE.

The mandate of the RWGE is to work as a consultative body on environmental issues to the Regional Committee and the Regional Council. The Committee and the Council may also submit suggestions to the RWGE. The RWGE should initiate environmental projects within the Barents Region and may appoint sub-committees for specific issues.

A yearly work plan is presented to the Regional Committee, as well as an annual progress report. A committee has been established by the RWGE with one representative from each country, on county level, with the objective to update the action programme and to identify a few project ideas that will be given priority in the work of the RWGE. The Chair of the BEAC working group on environment (EWG) participates in this sub-committee. There is close co-operation between the RWGE and the BEAC EWG.

A revision of the present action programme is being undertaken and main focus for further work will be on two major area; water quality and biodiversity in the Barents Region. An analysis of the present environmental situation in the Barents Region has been introduced and the results will form the base for a strategic plan on improvement of the environment in the Region.

An initiative has been taken by the RWGE on linking nature conservation and tourism in the Barents Region. The BEAC Environment Ministers welcomed at their meeting in Luleå on 28 August 2003 the work on developing an eco-tourism quality certification system adopted to the Barents Region by e.g. combining the results from the UN eco-tourism conference held in Hemavan in 2002 with national and international eco-tourism labelling schemes, such as «Nature’s Best».

Efforts to improve the environmental situation in the area around the Pechenganikel industrial complex are also addressed in the framework of the RWGE. The Pechenganikel industrial complex is a main threat to aquatic and terrestrial environments in the Finnish, Norwegian, and Russian border areas. Regional authorities in the counties of Finnmark, Lapland, and Murmansk have in collaboration with research institutes in the Barents Region drawn up a «Pasvik program». The objective of the «Pasvik program» is to develop and implement an environmental monitoring and assessment programme in the border areas. Nineteen institutions in the Barents Region are participating in the program. The longterm objective of the project is to ensure that the monitoring data covering the state of the environment are reliable, comparable, and available to authorities, environmental expert,and local people in the border areas.