MEDREGION meeting

3 May 2019

Deputy Secretary, Jo Foden, attended a meeting of the MEDREGION (Support Mediterranean member states towards the implementation of the MSFD Commission Decision on GES and programmes of measures, and contribute to regional/subregional cooperation) in Athens in April 2019.

Cooperation between Mediterranean EU member states to implement the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) has been given a boost with a project funded by a DG ENV grant agreement.MEDREGION’s objectives are:

  • Support the (sub)regional assessment of the extent to which good environmental status has been achieved;
  • Quantify the effect of the programmes of measures, including through linking monitoring programmes with measures;
  • Establish new (sub)regionally-coordinated measures, where needed.

The MEDREGION project is addressing two clusters of MSFD Descriptors: (a) biodiversity descriptors (mainly D1 and D6) and (b) pollution descriptors (D5, D8 and D10). Other Descriptors, will be considered, in the sense to their relation with biodiversity or pressure on biodiversity or regionally covered (as in UNEP/MAP) in EU and non-EU countries.

In April Jo Foden represented OSPAR in Athens at the MEDREGION’s first general assembly, as a member of the Advisory Board. Previous projects of the same consortium (e.g. MEDCIS) already established a fruitful collaboration with OSPAR. During MEDREGION further nurture this link to ensure that the project deliverables (common measures, effectiveness methodology) will be useful to the widest possible array of end-users, as well as detailed enough for a variety of specific uses.

The website of the project is under development but can still be viewed here