HNRI Newsletter

Green Week 2006 School Competition: European pupils apply their creativity to highlight biodiversity.

This year’s Green Week will focus on biodiversity. The annual environmental conference and exhibition will take place in Brussels between 30 May and 2 June 2006. Part of the event is the annual Green Week School Competition, which encourages young people from all EU Member States, candidate and EFTA countries to learn about environmental issues and express themselves artistically.

Younger children can enter the competition with drawings and paintings illustrating their opinions about biodiversity while older pupils are invited to submit short digital videos on the same theme. The top three winners of each category will be invited to Brussels for the awards ceremony during Green Week. A selection of the best entries in each category will be presented at the conference. Deadline for entries is 25 March.

Categories

The competition is open to all schools in the EU, candidate and EFTA countries. There will be two categories in the 2006 school competition:

Artwork - paintings and drawings: for individual pupils aged 5-10
Digital videos: for teams of up to four students aged 11-16.

Entries and Judging

Entries may only be submitted with the support of a school. Entries must be scanned, or created digitally, and sent to the Environment Directorate-General via the entry forms on the Green Week School Competition website accessible in 20 languages: www.greenweek2006.eun.org

Teachers are encouraged to make the competition part of the class activity and the website will offer some ideas and support. A network of expert teachers in the field of environmental education from all over Europe will assist the European Commission in carrying out the judging.

The deadline for both categories is 25 March 2006.

General information

The Green Week 2006 School Competition is being run by European Schoolnet (http://www.eun.org) on behalf of the European Commission's Environment Directorate-General. Questions about the competition can be addressed to Chris Coakley at the following email address: greenweek@eun.org

ENVIRONMENT – LIFE+ update

LIFE+ will take over from LIFE in the 2007-13 EU budgetary period. Greater emphasis will be placed upon nature and biodiversity, as well as the financing of certain environmental technology projects, if they are not eligible for financing under other Community financial instruments.

Overview

The LIFE+ programme's objectives are to finance the development, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and communication of Community environment policy and legislation, with a view to promoting sustainable development in the EU. LIFE+ will also support the implementation of the Sixth Environment Action Programme. An underlying principle is the mainstreaming environmental issues into other forms of EU, such as the Structural Funds, Rural Development programme, the Seventh Framework Programme and the Competitiveness and Innovation programme.