The fourth Bridging the Gap Conference was held at Portorož, Slovenia from 14 to 16 May 2008. It was sponsored by the European Commission, the European Environment Agency, the Environment Agency for England and Wales, the Environmental Protection Agency of Ireland and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and was attended by over 300 delegates.

The headline issues for the conference were:

• The need for urgent action; 
• Putting the environment at the heart of economic decision-making; and
•  Improving communication between scientists, policy-makers, politicians, business and civil society

and its main conclusions were:

The need for urgent action

The environment is changing rapidly in many respects, from climate to biodiversity and to ecosystems of every type. To adequately respond, we need a paradigm shift in the thinking that underlies political, economic and social policy development and planning. To achieve this it is necessary to engage the wider, non-scientific community. There is a real sense of urgency. A few of the main reasons were discussed during the conference such as the serious stress on our energy resources and food which is becoming visible through an increase in prices. However, in Western urban society there are the beginnings of a reconnection between people and the natural world. This new emerging attitude affords an opportunity to promote and accept the notion that the impact on the environment in every sphere of life must be considered. In this context there is an urgent need to put to better use all existing information, expertise (lay, local and scientific) along with the available tools, methods and processes to support action. Building up stakeholders and communities to respond to the challenges is the key. Achieving a consensus on possible options for the future could energise active participation and help us move beyond the mere acceptance of the compromises required to support sustainable development objectives to a mindset of building innovative solutions.

Putting the environment at the heart of economic decision-making

Both private and public institutes must engage and overcome the inaction created by the question: who must act first, business or policy? We must radically improve integration and connections across activities and sectors, including:

• ­using more spatial planning which lies at the heart of the effective management of biodiversity and ecosystem services and the sustainable use of natural resources which support climate change adaptation and economic decision-making;
• taking a leadership role in protecting biodiversity & ecosystems services such as what the EU did on climate change before Kyoto;
• promote biodiversity and ecosystems in the development of sectoral policies;
• promote inter-disciplinary research and funding, which should be regarded more as an investment rather than spending per se, for it to address issues concerning food, water, air, energy, climate change, biodiversity-ecosystem services and poverty;
• consider the solutions to climate change and the choice of energy sources in the global context; 
• fully include the environmental and social criteria when assigning EU Structural and Cohesion Funds; and
• develop the concept of the non-economic value of what matters – moving beyond GDP.

Improving action and communication between scientists, policy-makers, politicians, business and civil society

The investment of resources in improved data and information quality, reach and accessibility emerged as key issues. There are major societal sectors (such as health, the urban environment, environmental crime) where the available information is woeful in all these respects, in other cases interlinkages are missing (i.e. between environmental and socio-economic information) as well as a forward-looking component. There are other areas (such as meteorology and cartography) where the information quality and reach are excellent but where accessibility is only excellent within the closed community of the discipline. In general, more data is collected than used. Cross-sectoral access to this data is vital for the full social and economic exploitation of the public investments already made in gathering and managing them. Steady progress is being made concerning the mechanics and technology required for this to happen.  

The marginal costs of the further exploitation of public data are low, yet the economic rewards of doing so could be huge. The European Environment Agency showed a potential return to central exchequers measured in billions of euros from the commercial exploitation of environmental data if they were freely available. However, many of the current data gathering and exchange programmes are examples not of free access and distribution but of the careful protection of data within a restricted (public service) user community. This protectionism is driven by internal political requirements to recover or off-set investments, yet it creates gaps between the generating community and any wider user base. These gaps can be hard to bridge. Initiatives aiming to improve access to information such as SEIS, INSPIRE, GMES & GEOSS and the PSI Directive need to be integrated to deliver, in all scales of space and time, timely and targeted information and facilitate the development of services to maximise its use. When fully adopted and funded, the EU and global initiatives have the potential to bridge many of the gaps and facilitate the development of a vast new e-commerce economy. However, user needs, free access to products and the encouragement of the e-economy so as to empower users at levels down to the individual citizen which drive these initiatives conflict with the data use and protection policies now in place in several important sectors. Unless these conflicts are resolved at the political level, the concepts currently being envisaged may struggle to come to fruition.

Communication between the science community and both the political and the wider civil community is an area of weakness. The science community must learn to deliver its message through a succinct, understandable ‘story’ without the use of jargon and presumed knowledge. It has to be able to talk to the heart of the people. That is a difficult task and science is generally ill equipped for it. There is a need for positive action to enhance and develop this skill within the science base. This is vital if the developing world is ever to be persuaded that the model that created wealth for the developed world is unsustainable and that a different path is needed for the future.

Communication and co-operation between different actors in the community have become ever more important in achieving efficient and sustainable actions. While it is becoming increasingly important to reach every individual, this needs to be complemented with efforts to build targeted communities (such as the Bridging the Gap community) to support community action.