ARC members welcome EUROCONTROL’s Collaborative Environmental Management (CEM) Working Arrangement as it can provide a platform for operational stakeholder collaboration that could significantly reduce environmental impacts. Benefits could be achieved in terms of improved sustainable environmental performance (e.g. reduced noise and emissions), development of Climate Adaptation plans and enhanced communication through robust dialogue, thus building trust and long-term engagement among all stakeholders.
ARC members view the outcomes of the CEM Working Arrangement, defined in EUROCONTROL’s CEM Specification, as a potential framework to elaborate or improve the relationships between public territorial administrations and airports. It can help to establish predictability and efficiency relationships with the airport that can lead to collaborative solutions beneficial to all stakeholders involved
Moreover, we believe CEM contains a sound generic methodology that facilitates concrete collaborative solutions being implemented by the key operational stakeholders to minimise the environmental impacts of airports and aviation in general. The adoption of CEM as a continued and organised dialogue with local authorities and communities as sine qua non condition can contribute to both: achieving sustainable development goals and deliver in other areas such as quality of life, health outcomes, air quality and noise.
The CEM Specification contains a number of optional elements that ARC members believe should be implemented. This will enable the surrounding area of the airport to be involved in the decision-making and dialogue processes.
Short description of CEM
The CEM Specification formalises internal collaboration amongst the core operational stakeholders at and around airports. The objective is to minimise the environmental impact of their combined operations, by setting out generic, high-level requirements and recommended practices necessary to either establish CEM Working Arrangements or, flexibly adapt existing ones in a pragmatic protocol to suit local needs and capabilities. Outcomes from CEM can feed into established dialogue channels with local authorities and local communities to address common concerns.
Airport Regions and CEM
The CEM collaborative process can include public consultations (such as public workshops) with the three stakeholder groups, to be held in a non-competitive setting. It is important to note that none of the stakeholders manages any of the others. The central goal is to understand the interdependencies between stakeholders’ activities and build trust.
It is a process that takes into account the interdependencies between core stakeholders inside and outside the airport: airport operators, aircraft operators and air traffic control (ANSPs) as well as local authorities and communities. Thus achieving gains that, without everyone’s collaboration, would not be achievable.
Opportunities of CEM
ARC welcomes the opportunities of this working arrangement as it sees CEM as:
A harmonised approach agreed at a European level to tackle environmental impacts at the local level, hence comparability for the implementation of level playing fields;
A framework to support understanding and awareness of environmental/operational inter-dependencies among internal operational stakeholders;
A focus to identify the root causes of environmental impacts/risks and facilitate common sustainable solutions;
A working agreement facilitates a robust and transparent dialogue that can harmonise relations with authorities and engagement with local communities and businesses.
Conclusions
ARC members believe that the CEM Specification can help manage the relationship with the airports, citing the numerous reasons above. We believe that the relationship with external stakeholders of airports is crucial and that this Specification may help to solve issues that many European airport regions are facing now and in the longer term.
ARC members believe that the CEM working arrangement must always include permanent dialogue and agreements with local authorities and communities as a must.
Therefore, we ask European, national and regional authorities and the core operational stakeholders at Airports in all EU regions to adopt and use CEM as a first step to establish permanent and fruitful relationships beneficial to all stakeholders.
Comments