Issues and Themes (tutorial page)

This is a tutorial page, it should help those making an SoE report to better understand the ideas and concepts behind the SoE template. After the report is prepared, this page should be removed. At a later stage this can be automatically handled by the software, at the moment you will need to do it manually by deleting this file from your report's directory.

Several groups of issues, or themes, can be included into the report.

The first group of issues deals directly with environmental problems:

  • Physical environment includes most traditional SoE issues such as air quality, water supply, urban biodiversity and landscape. These issues best characterise local environmental situation,

  • Social environment includes such issues as housing, unemployment, crime etc, and complements the previous one by extending the description of city environment to include the social dimension,

  • External impact includes issues that are mostly felt on the regional (or even global) scale, whereas a city may have a significant effect on them. The examples are global warming and resource consumption.

The second group of themes describes main causes of environmental problems altogether and measures which are applied to solve them:

  • Economic sectors present branches of city economy which are main Driving Forces behind city environmental problems. Sectoral economic indicators and information about sectors' interaction with the environment is interesting both as part of the context and for addressing a sectoral dimension of environmental problems. (There may also be a chapter about city economy altogether included into this group.)

  • Instruments and policies of societal Response describe various measures taken by the city (and possibly other constituencies) to address the entire range of environmental problems. Information is given about how advanced different management instruments and policies are, how they are applied to concrete environmental problems, and whether they are making a difference.

Within each theme information can be structured in a clear and easily understandable way following a complete or simplified DPSIR framework.

Click here for additional information about DPSIR framework, the indicators, and the report template