Eurowa members gather online for their 2021 network meeting

During the last week of April, EUROWA member organisations and technical experts came together on Zoom for a network meeting, their first gathering under the EUROWA-2 project.

The meeting, originally planned as a three day in-person event, had to be shifted to an online format due to the pandemic, but nonetheless produced some very rich discussions and reflections from the participants on a wide range of EUROWA activities. The meeting took place over three half days from 27-29 April, and was chaired and facilitated by Sea Alarm as EUROWA-2 project coordinators. Twenty-two people took part, including members of the EUROWA Governance Committee and the technical experts who form part of the EUROWA pool of wildlife response expertise.

The first day of the meeting covered discussions on EUROWA communications including the new website, development of new training packages, and plans for various courses being organised within the EUROWA-2 project.

Day 2 was dedicated entirely to training for team members on the EUROWA Standard Operating Procedure (SOP). The session was designed to maintain and update network members’ understanding of the contents and principles of the SOP, which describes how organisations would operate together to support a requesting country during an oil spill in Europe. The SOP training included a tabletop exercise exploring the implications of an international mobilisation for team members.

The final day of the meeting was given over to a network General Assembly meeting to discuss progress on the EUROWA Work Programme 2020-2022 and to inform the participants about planned technical activities in the next months for the EUROWA-2 project.

The meeting provided an important opportunity for the network to come together to emphasise the sense of working as a community, discussing technical issues and progressing on delivering EUROWA-2 project tasks. The next network meeting organised under the EUROWA-2 project will be held in 2022 in Ostend, Belgium.