Regional Centre

The Stockholm Convention Regional Centre for Capacity Building and the Transfer of Technology (hereafter referred to as Regional Centre) in the Czech Republic was endorsed by the decision SC-4/23 by the fourth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (COP4) in 2009.

The Regional Centre is a part of the RECETOX, which is an independent Research Centre for Toxic Compounds in the Environment operating within the Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic. RECETOX has its seat in the new University Campus in Brno Bohunice.

The Regional Centre provides long-term support in chemicals management to 23 countries of Central and Eastern Europe and serves as a strategic scientific partner for over 30 countries in Africa and Asia. The Regional Centre also works as a project partner with UNEP, UNIDO and UNDP to build environmental capacities in developing countries and organizes conferences, workshops, and summer schools. It also provides its scientific capacities, other expertise and long-term experience in finding practical solutions for environmental challenges to all interested stakeholders including other Stockholm Convention Regional Centres, secretariat of the Stockholm Convention (or Joint secretariat of the three conventions) and international organizations.

Activities of the Regional Centre are supported by the long term contract with the Ministry of the Environment of the Czech Republic in the first place and through available funding from RECETOX research projects and capacity building activities. Director of the Regional Centre is to coordinate activities, cooperate with stakeholders and identify opportunities to use research outputs, expertise and instrumentation, laboratory and other capacity of the RECETOX to respond to needs of its stakeholders in chemicals management, to accelerate the implementation of the Stockholm Convention, and other global instruments in the field of chemicals and wastes and to contribute and to find solutions to pressing environmental issues.

Objectives of the Regional Centre

• Support implementation of the requirements and measures in the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (in line with decisions SC-2/9 and SC-3/9) and provide support and cooperation to its partners through capacity building and the transfer of technology for monitoring, sampling and analytical methods and approaches, environmental modelling, data analyses, ecotoxicology and risk assessment.
• Contribute to solution of environmental problems – identification of environmental contamination, case studies, design and cooperation in set up and operation of laboratory infrastructures and monitoring networks, transfer of research findings in to practice, data generation, their effective management and use; risk assessment and assistance/consultancy in remediation, decontamination of contaminated sites/environmental hotspots.
• Accelerate ratification of and implementation of global instruments for sound management of chemicals and waste and link available information on environmental science (environmental chemistry, ecotoxicology, effects of chemicals on living organisms, environment and health risk assessments and evaluation of effects of environment contaminated by chemicals on biodiversity and ecosystems.
• Contribute to development and operation of specialized regional centers able to provide technical assistance (among others capacity building and the transfer of technology and know-how) within its field of expertise also to Parties and stakeholders outside its geographical region.

Key areas of our work

Our Regional Centre provides assistance in the following fields (no order of importance):

• Capacity building and training of both technical staff and decision makers
• Monitoring
• Data generation and efficient data management and use
• International cooperation to support capacity building
• Research projects and joint cooperation
• Implementation of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants
• Cooperation with other Regional Centres (SC/BC)
• Awareness Raising
• Cooperation and coordination among global legally binding instruments on chemicals management as well as other related tools – synergies

More information

The RC website

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