Phase 4 of the U.S. – German Bilateral Working Group will sustain and enhance the work of Phase 3 through the development and application of mutually beneficial technologies, strategies and decision tools to redevelop contaminated lands in both countries. However, Phase 4 will look specifically at the development and application of tools and innovative programs in relation to regional issues affecting redevelopment of contaminated properties.

In U.S., under Phase 4, SMARTe will serve as a primary channel through which the data and innovation from abroad will be channelled and applied. The guiding theme framing the research will be criteria and indicators for sustainable decisions in land management.

Bilateral cooperation under Phase 4 in Germany will fall under selected research projects funded under the "Research for the Reduction of Land Consumption and for Sustainable Land Management” (REFINA) program – a program under the Federal Government’s National Strategy for Sustainable Development. The aim of the Federal Government’s National Strategy for Sustainability is to reduce the consumption of open space for housing and transport to one-third of the present consumption – to 30 hectares/75 acres per day by the year 2020.

In addition to bilateral information exchanges and working relations between the counterparts, joint workshops on common interest topics will be the basis for the bilateral working group cooperation.

As follow-up of the bilateral workshop in New York, EPA is entering into a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Germany. Within the project "The Terra, Aqua & Site Remediation Competence Centre Leipzig (TASK)" the UFZ will develop DE.SMARTe.org, a mirror image of SMARTe in German, and will develop tools that can be re-mirrored back into SMARTe. TASK is dealing with an accelerated technology and know-how transfer in the fields of soil and groundwater remediation and contaminated site revitalisation and is jointly funded by the BMBF and UFZ. The development of DE.SMARTe.org is to implement several tools and results from the German funding programs such as REFINA, KORA (Retention and Degredation Processes to Reduce Contaminants in Groundwater and Soil) or SAFIRA (Innovative technologies for the economical remediation of complexly contaminated groundwater) into the decision support system and make them freely available to an international audience. BMBF highly supports knowledge transfer from current and former funding programs. Main activities of the REFINA program in its final part are dissemination and knowledge transfer. In this context, TASK and US EPA will execute two bilateral workshops, one in 2009 in Germany and a second in 2010 in the United States.

SMARTe

SMARTe (Sustainable Management Approaches and Revitalization Tools – electronic) is a freely available, open source, web-based, decision support system located at: www.smarte.org. SMARTe helps users overcome site revitalization obstacles by providing information, resources, links, and case studies for all aspects of revitalization including planning, environmental issues, social acceptance, and economic viability. SMARTe also contains analysis tools for evaluating specific aspects of revitalization such as analyzing site characterization data, performing risk assessments, selecting a developer, and converting units of measurement. Further, SMARTe is an integrated decision support system that allows revitalization stakeholders to objectively evaluate reuse options for specific sites and circumstances using a cost-benefit calculator. Revitalization stakeholders can use SMARTe to help them understand social, economic, and ecological trade-offs, present information to other stakeholders, and develop a revitalization plan.

The current version of SMARTe requires additional development in areas such as: visioning, GIS capabilities, risk assessment, fate and transport modeling, remediation technology selection, identifying sources of money, sustainability, creating a revitalization plan and cost-benefit analysis. Additionally, EPA wishes to expand SMARTe to allow users to incorporate regional considerations in sustainable land management planning (specifically from Phase 4 of the US-German Bilateral Working Group). New versions of SMARTe will be released every year with new tools and capabilities.

The USEPA is currently seeking partners for a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to further research and develop decision support tools related to sustainable land management. Tools such as educational materials, documents, case studies, checklists, calculators, spreadsheets, databases and decision analysis tools will be developed and incorporated into SMARTe. All such tools developed under Phase 4 of the US-German Bilateral Working Group will be included.

SMARTe Quality Assurance Project Plan