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Expert: Dr. Liz Mills, Independent Policy Analyst & Associate, Institute for European Environmental Policy.
A freelance policy analyst since 1994, Liz Mills specialises in policy for sustainability, planning and the urban environment in Europe, EU funding programmes, comparative research and good practice. Originally an urban geographer with a PhD from Bristol University, she previously spent 16 years in university teaching and research in public policy, specialising in local government.
Liz has had a longstanding involvement with policy development for the urban environment at European level, having been a consultant to the Commission’s Expert Group on the Urban Environment from 1993 and desk officer in DG Environment 1997-8. She co-drafted the first European Sustainable Cities report, the Aalborg Charter and the Commission’s 1998 Communication Sustainable Urban Development in the EU: A Framework for Action.
Liz often works with individual cities and networks in EU-funded projects. She was UK Contact Point for INTERREG IIIC. She is a thematic expert for URBACT II and experienced as an evaluator in LIFE, Intelligent Energy Europe and FP7.
Liz has a portfolio of policy and advisory work in the UK, mostly in Wales, relating to the built environment, land use planning, energy and adaptation to climate change.
Expert: Dr. Henrik Gudmundsson, Senior Researcher, Department of Transport, Technical University of Denmark.
Henrik Gudmundsson has been a Senior Researcher in Sustainable Transport at the Technical University of Denmark since 2006. He is educated as an Environmental planner and has a PhD from Copenhagen Business School. His main area of research is sustainable transport governance and policy analysis, including the use of knowledge and indicators in the design, implementation and monitoring of transport plans. Henrik is the National Principle Contact Point (PCP) on transport indicators in Denmark for the European Environment Agency (EEA), and a member of the scientific advisory board for the Swedish Government’s Transport Analysis agency. Henrik is currently involved in fourmajor research projects on transport policy and planning. He is a member the Committees on ‘Performance Measurement’ and ‘Transportation and Sustainability’ of the US Transportation Research Board.
Before assuming his current position Henrik has been involved in State of the Environment Reporting for Denmark at the National Environmental Research Institute (1993- 2006) and prior to that he was a Head of Section in the Danish Environmental Protection Agency (1988-2003).
Expert: Ms Ir. Hedwig van Delden, Director, Research Institute for Knowledge Systems (RIKS), Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Hedwig van Delden is the General Director of the Research Institute for Knowledge Systems (RIKS) in Maastricht, the Netherlands. After graduating from the University of Twente as a Civil Engineer in Water Engineering and Management, she started working at RIKS as a Policy Analyst and in the following years gradually rose to the position of General Director. Over the years she has taken on many roles ranging from Researcher to Project Manager and Project Leader working on integrating models and modeling tools from a broad range of fields such as land use change, hydrology, economics and transport.
Her academic work focuses on issues relating to model integration on the conceptual level and process management in integrated modeling system implementations. In this capacity she has authored or co-authored a long list of peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. Her most recent conference presentations were at the International Environmental Modelling and Software Societies Fifth Biennial Meeting in Ottawa, Canada and the International Conference on managing the Urban Rural interface in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Expert: Dr. Jake Piper, Associate and Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Technology, Design and Environment, Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom.
Jake Piper has worked as a researcher and lecturer at Oxford Brookes University for the past twelve years, following on from an earlier career in environmental consultancy. Her academic background includes forestry and land management, and environmental assessment.
In recent years she has contributed to and managed studies of policy development and spatial planning, frequently as related to biodiversity protection and enhancement in circumstances of climate change, as part of EU programmes (MACIS, BRANCH), and she has been a peer reviewer of the C-Change project which promotes community engagement and behaviour change as well as creating multi-functional spaces. She has also worked on studies preparing guidance for projects affecting Natura 2000 sites, and projects concerned with rural development.
Issues around biodiversity, water resources, flooding and sustainable drainage have been a particular interest – as demonstrated in her recent book Spatial Planning and Climate Change (with Elizabeth Wilson). Other project work has involved the economic and environmental assessment of many forms of development, including offshore wind, water resources, railway infrastructure, forestry and leisure.
Expert: Dr. Steen Solvang Jensen, Department of Environmental Science, Aarhus University, Denmark.
Steen Solvang Jensen is Senior Scientist, PhD at the Department of Environmental Science, Aarhus University in Denmark. He is a civil engineer with a specialization in planning with 22 years of experience within traffic planning and urban air quality assessment and management. He has worked as project manager within research, consultancy and administration, and has acted as an advisor for the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and international development agencies. His main experience is within research and development of integrated modelling systems for air pollution and human exposures for application in decision-support systems in urban air quality management and in air pollution epidemiological studies. These studies include mapping, impact assessment, scenario analysis, and policy options within emission, air quality, human exposures, health and external costs of air pollution as well as environmental impacts of renewable energy systems and technologies (hydrogen, biofuels, biomass).
Expert: Mr. J. Luis Bento-Coelho, Professor, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal.
J. Luis Bento Coelho is an Electrical Engineer with a MSc. and a PhD. in Acoustics and is a Fellow of the International Institute of Acoustics and Vibration (IIAV). He is a Professor of Acoustics at Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST), TULisbon, Portugal, where he is the Head of the Group of Acoustics and Noise Control and the Director of the Diploma on Advances Studies on Acoustical Engineering post-graduate course. He is the Immediate Past President of the IIAV, is a member of the Expert Panel on Noise (EpoN) of the European Environmental Agency and a member of the EU-CNOSSOS Technical Committee. He is a Chartered Acoustical Engineer with a large experience on environmental noise, transportation noise and urban acoustics. He has been involved with noise mapping and action plans, being responsible for projects in large cities in Portugal and in Brazil, and for many transport infra-structures. He has published more than 200 technical and scientific papers, is the author of a chapter in the “Handbook of Acoustics & Vibration Control” (John Wiley & Sons, 2007) and is the co-author of a number of recent international technical reports.
Expert: Mr. Larry O’Toole, Director, Waste and Energy Division, RPS Consulting Engineers, Dublin, Ireland.
Larry O’Toole is Director of the Waste and Energy Division at RPS Consulting Engineers. He is a Chartered Civil Engineer with 24 years experience of civil and environmental engineering and waste strategy and planning in Ireland and in the UK. He has been Project Manager for a broad range of waste and energy projects and is currently responsible for a team of engineers, scientists and waste planners providing a wide range of services to both the public and private sectors in UK and Ireland. These include national strategic studies, regional waste plans, siting studies, feasibility, design and procurement of recycling, recovery and disposal facilities and renewable energy projects including wind energy, anaerobic digestion and biofuels.
He is a chartered member of Engineers Ireland and was invited to presented on “Integrated Waste Management and Climate Change” at International Conference on Cities and Climate Change, New Delhi, India, Feb 2011.
Expert: Mr. Shailendra Mudgal, Executive Director, Bio Intelligence Service, France.
Shailendra Mudgal is a civil-environmental engineer with 19 years of experience in environmental consulting and has a specific expertise in water management.
He has worked on a range of projects in India dealing with leak detection in water supply networks, river basin action plan, stormwater management, and water quality and quantity modeling.
During last 10 years, he has worked on water policy sector in France and Europe. He led several studies for the European Commission on Water Efficiency Standards and the Water Performance of Buildings (http://www.waterefficiency.eu) and also contributed to studies for the European Parliament. He contributed to the 2011 UNEP Green Economy Report and also supported the EEA on two chapters dealing with social and technological megatrends of the European Environment State and Outlook Report (SOER) 2010. Recently, he advised the UNFCCC on the methodology for evaluating the water saving devices in the context of the clean development mechanism.
Expert: Dr. Katharina Lenz, Surface Water Unit, Environment Agency Austria
Katharina Lenz is a specialist in waste water management and water statistics, who holds a PhD in Land and Water Management and Engineering. Since 2006 Katharina has been involved in DG ENV service contracts for technical and administrative assistance for implementation of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (91/271/EEC). She was furthermore involved as expert in the 2004 Transition Facility Multi-Country Statistical Integration Programme and the Multi-Beneficiary Statistical Co-operation Programme for Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey 2005 – Lot 2, dealing with the implementation of EUROSTAT waste water statistics in new Member States and Accession Countries. Katharina is also a co-author of the EUROSTAT “Data Collection Manual for the OECD/EUROSTAT Joint Questionnaire on Inland Waters (version 2.2).
Katharina has profound and thorough experience and knowledge with the situation of waste water treatment in Europe, the process of the implementation of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive and the availability and quality of data describing this situation.
Expert: Dr. Stefan Speck, Project Manager environmental economics and policies at the Integrated Environmental Assessments Programme at the European Environment Agency.
Stefan Speck is an environmental economist with a PhD in economics. His main area of research is the application of market-based instruments for environmental policy, environmental fiscal reform, and green economy.
Prior to his current position, he was employed as a senior consultant at Kommunalkredit Public Consulting in Austria and as a senior project scientist at the National Environmental Research Institute/University of Aarhus in Denmark within the EU-funded project ‘Competitiveness effects of environmental tax reforms’ (COMETR). He also contributed to the research project ‘Resource Productivity, Environmental Tax Reform and Sustainable Growth in Europe’ funded by the Anglo-German Foundation.
He has implemented projects for a range of clients including the Danish Environmental Protection Agency (DEPA), European Commission (EC), Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, and the UK Department for International Development (DFID). He has carried out research projects in Africa and Asia, and has published widely on economic instruments and environmental financing and recently co-edited the book Environmental Tax Reform (ETR) A Policy for Green Growth (Oxford University Press, 2011).
Expert: Mr Jan Dictus, Founder of GOJA Consulting for Environment and Sustainable Development, Vienna, Austria
Jan Dictus is an independent consultant and founder of GOJA Consulting. Jan has Dutch nationality and has been living and working in Austria since 2000. He has provided services to a wide range of clients at international, European, regional and local levels on environmental and sustainable development issues.
For the City of Vienna Jan has lead the development of the Environmental Vision of Vienna. He also represented Vienna as Technical Chair of the Environment Forum of EUROCITIES in 2009 and 2010.
As a UNIDO expert Jan has been involved in the organisation and reporting of conferences in Jordan and Bahrain on urban sustainability and green business and in the promotion of Eco-business projects in India and Thailand. At the moment Jan is working on the development of Green Award mechanisms in Cambodia.
In Europe Jan works presently as urban expert for several EU funded projects, e.g. on energy efficiency, on social housing and on public lighting. In some of these projects Jan is using Deep Dives and Peer Reviews to structure the systematic exchange between cities.
Jan is a Lead Expert for URBACT-II and a member of the expert group for the “UNEP-JCEP Sustainable Urban Development and Liveable Garden Community – China Programme“ in China.
Expert: Prof. Per G. Berg, Professor in Landscape planning with a special focus on Sustainable Community Development at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala.
Per G. Berg is professor in Landscape Planning with a special focus on Sustainable Community Development in Urban and Rural settings. He has been Research Director for local community studies in 11 cities in the Baltic Sea region for 20 years and is at present investigating functional densification in Swedish townscapes in three cities. He has recently taken the initiative to study Sustainable Cities in a Research consortium including 12 European cities from north-Eastern St Petersburg to Southern Milan as a lead partner in a FP7 EU application currently under revision for a new application. The Research of sustainable cities and local communities is done theoretically drawing from the cutting-edge policy documents of the UN Habitat agenda, in practical case studies and in leading a practical implementation project in Uppsala Sweden: Hågaby resilient cityland. With a background in Biology and Chemistry he has for 30 years had a particular interest in renewable energy issues.
Per G. Berg is member of the ICE Engineering Sustainability Journal and Journal of Environmental Quality Editorial Advisory Board and has been invited to join the expert panel of Sustainability and currently is organiser of the 6th international landscape architecture conference in St. Petersburg, Helsinki, Stockholm and Uppsala in June 2012.