About REMEDE

• Project Brochure (pdf)
• Project Technical Summary (pdf)
  

On 30 April 2004, Directive 2004/35/EC on Environmental Liability with regard to the prevention and remedying of environmental damage entered into force. The objective of the EU Environmental Liability Directive is to establish a common framework for the prevention and remediation of environmental damage at a reasonable cost to society.

REMEDE is designed to support Annex 2 of the Directive which lists different methodologies that can be used for this common framework.

The goal of the REMEDE project is to develop, test and disseminate methods for determining the scale of the remedial measures necessary to adequately offset environmental damage. The project draws from both US experience, in terms of methodological developments and implementation issues encountered, and experience of the EU Member States. It aims to apply and develop these in accordance with the requirements of the Environmental Liability Directive and the Environmental Impact Assessment, Habitats and Wild Birds Directives, in order that a standard Toolkit can be applied to all damage cases in the EU. The project brings together ecologists, economists and legal experts from the USA and Europe to review experience in the application of resource equivalency methods, draft a Toolkit document for the EU, test the Toolkit through application to case studies in different Member States, and disseminate the Toolkit to relevant stakeholders.

The REMEDE project is not intended, however, to answer the following questions:

• When is environmental damage deemed “significant”? This is a political decision that needs to be decided by Member States and hence the REMEDE project does not make a judgment about it.
• What primary remediation should be undertaken? The estimation of how much primary remediation to undertake usually does not require an equivalency analysis and hence is not covered by the Toolkit.
• What should the baseline be? The Toolkit contains information on options for calculating baselines, but does not recommend the best baseline option in any context.