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Welcome to our Team. We are looking forward to meeting you and working with you in Bristol. You will be working with two people during the week - Lorraine Taylor and Kim Thomas - both of us work at the Environment Agency. This is the organisation which is legally responsible to enhance and protect the environment and to promote sustainable development in England and Wales. Our Headquarters is in Bristol.
Here is some information to give you a bit of idea what we're going to be doing, and how your investigations can make a real contribution.
During the week we are going to look at current plans for sustainable development, and how this is affecting people's lives in Bristol.
In 1992, nearly 180 countries met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janerio to
discuss how to achieve sustainable development. They agreed that the definition
of sustainable development is
"development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the
ability of future generations to meet their own needs"
- basically don't mess up the environment for our children!
Agenda 21 is the name for the plan of action that came out of the summit. It highlights that population, consumption and technology are the main causes of environmental change. A major theme of Agenda 21 is the need to get rid of poverty by giving poor people more access to the resources they need to live sustainably. It puts most of the responsibility for change on national governments, but says they need to work in a broad series of partnerships with community groups and others.
Next year it will be the ten-year anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit on environment and development. Unfortunately it looks like governments and people have still not done enough to respond to the crisis. In UK Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech "Environment: the next steps" he announced his commitment to going personally to the Rio +10 conference in South Africa.
Your Japan 2001 Project will help form a picture of how sustainable development is being achieved in the UK, and through the Environment Agency will provide Tony Blair with some food for thought when he attends the Rio +10 conference next year. We will be especially interested to have the views of our Japanese students and see what they think about what they discover in the Workshop.
Your Japan 2001 Project will take what is happening in the Bristol area as an example for study. Bristol City Council has a Local Agenda 21 Action Plan that identifies all the things that could be done to make the environment better. The Council has used indicators to find out whether things are getting better or worse, but they haven't yet asked people what they think about these plans!
So, when we have explained the Bristol situation more fully, we want you to choose some issues that you think are really important for sustainable development in Bristol, such as things to do with community safety, biodiversity and health and well being.
Then we will ask you do some research to see if and how people think things are better than they used to be and compare this to the picture painted by the indicators. We will suggest that you focus your investigation on two quite different areas of Bristol.
The information you collect and the Report you write will be given to the Bristol City Council to help them assess how good their indicators are at assessing public perceptions, and we hope to be able to advise them on what they could be doing better to make sustainable development really happen. What you discover will also be of value to the Environment Agency on a national scale also.
Before you arrive, we suggest you look at a few websites to see what's
happening on sustainable development. Here are two, but you may know others,
and again we will be very interested to have information from Japan also.
www.number-10.gov.uk
www.detr.gov.uk
We look forward to welcoming you to the Japan 2001 Workshop in the very near future.
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