Environmental protection is crucial for the sustainable development of South East Europe. The region as a whole has been suffering from a legacy of poor environmental management, including increasingly old and contaminated industrial sites, extensive use of landfill sites, lack of facilities to deal with hazardous materials. Moreover, many industrial facilities can only operate though highly intensive use of low quality fuel, generating large quantities of pollution. These problems are compounded by an underdeveloped water supply system, which affect the quality of potable water, and the lack of waste water treatment plants for both municipal and industrial sewage.

As part of their common objective to gradually integrate into the European Union, the countries of the region have committed themselves to compliance with EU environmental laws, standards and policies: the two SEE EU accession states – Bulgaria and Romania – have already largely harmonized their national legislation with the EU environmental acquis communautaire; of course, implementation of such legislation and regulations remains a major challenge. The countries involved in the Stabilisation and Association process which have recently embarked, in the context of the SAp, on a process of fulfilling EU environment-related regulations as well. The process is very complex and enforcement of environmental legislation is still rather weak in some of them. The need for substantial amounts of investments and institution building to help the countries in their efforts has been identified..

Due to the shared legacy of existing problems in the sector across the SEE states, as well as its potentially large cross-border externalities arising from the fact that interventions in environment can have effects well beyond the boundaries of the country in which they are being undertaken, it has been increasingly recognized, by the international community and the SEE countries alike, that a coherent regional approach to environment, allowing for coordinated action in more than one country, can increase the benefits and reduce the costs of environmental programs.

To enhance the cooperation between the countries and the international community in environment, a number of regional initiatives have been established

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