The "5th Environmental Conference of Regional Ministers and Political Leaders in the EU" will take place in Villach (Carinthia / Austria) from 27th to 28th September 2001.

SERI presented a paper, commissioned by the Government of Carinthia and supported by the Austrian ministery of the environment to promote the attractiveness and transparency of the theme "eco-efficient regions".

In the course of the European process to integrate ecological affairs in all levels and areas of politics, the European regions play an important but hitherto rather neglected role. Therefore, this SERI-project is an initiative to make this topic politically more relevant. An important role has been identified for the introduction of headline indicators of an economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable development.

Eco-Efficiency of Regions (abstract)

Paper by Friedrich Hinterberger
With contributions by Klaus Bamberger, Christopher Manstein, Philipp Schepelmann, Francois Schneider and Joachim Spangenberg

The paper deals with the question in which ways the concept of eco-efficiency can make a valuable contribution to a sustainable regional development in the European Union. Eco-efficiency and dematerialization strategies are more and more successfully established at the business level where practical and easy understandable methods and management tools have been developed and applied in the past years and decades. On the micro level more and more cases have been identified where environmental protection on the one hand and competitiveness as well as the creation of jobs on the other are as a general rule no longer trade-offs but complements.
On the regional level the situation is somewhat different. Althoughsustainable development is increasingly integrated in EU-policy the knowledge about the application of eco-efficiency concepts for the regional level is lagging behind.

Therefore this paper aims at setting out:

Chapter 1 starts with a short presentation of the concept of eco-efficiency together with examples of successful applications. Chapter 2 looks at the role of the regions within the European Union and at the EU Regional Policy. The main chapter (3), dealing with eco-efficiency approaches in the EU-regions, firstly presents principal guidelines for orientation purposes, on the bases of which strategic objectives are derived. Then, fields of action are identified and discussed. Afterwards, the main advantages but also shortcomings of regional eco-efficiency are briefly summarised.

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