Developing new decision-making tools to promote the sustainable development in European cities based on Eco-industrial park strategy

BASELINE DATA COMPARATIVE REPORT

Taking into consideration the objective of Work Package 3 (WP3) - “Implantation and evaluation of decision-making tools” - the first step to be considered is the gathering of all necessary data from the parks. The amount of effort dedicated to this first step is crucial for the quality of the results obtained from the use of the tools and their importance for the sustainable development of the parks considered. As stated within the Deliverable 4, the decision-making tool developed in the ECOPADEV combines: - A evaluation methodology to obtain and analyse starting baseline data; - Environmental, social and economic indicators to quantify the evolution of the quality of urban life; - A web based tool to support the method and the indicators, improving user friendliness of the tool and facilitating the possibility to evaluate different scenarios, real or hypothetical. The web base support tool (which will be referred from this point forwards only as “tool”) will help the user in the decision-making process by applying the developed methodology to each of the five topics developed under the ECOPADEV project: - Environment - Health and Safety, Materials and Production Processes; - Transport; - Energy and Sustainable Building; - Marketing; - Human Resources, Quality of life and Community Connections. In order to facilitate the work required and help clarifying sustainability objectives towards the development of Eco-Industrial parks, a closer relationship was established between the City Councils and Parks, creating the Tandems. Tandems were responsible for the work of collecting the necessary information and analyse the results given by the decision-making tools. To enrich the process and take full advantage of the potentialities being offered by the tool, Tandems were asked to create Working Groups (Management and/or Technical). These working groups were responsible for the analysis and selection of the improvement suggestions given by the tool and the indicators to monitor the parks progress towards sustainable development.