An Environmental Financing Strategy for one or more environmental sectors is the result of an iterative process towards a coherent and realistic planning of the future service level and the financing of the sector.

The Environmental Financing Strategies fill a gap between sector policies that identify and analyse problems and set general long-term objectives,on the one hand, and feasibility studies, public budgeting and investment planning, on the other hand.

Different questions may be addressed in Environmental Financing Strategies, for instance:

• What is the realistic time frame for improving the quality of water supply in small towns?
• What is the affordable level of wastewater treatment in different regions and sizes of agglomeration?
• Which waste collection and recovery system is needed to meet the EU requirements regarding packaging waste and what are the financial implications?
• s the current level of maintenance and re-investment sustainable?
• How much can efficiency improvements contribute to achieving balance between expenditure need and available financial resources?
• Are full cost recovery user charges affordable?

The development of a national or regional Environmental Financing Strategy for Water Supply, Waste Water Treatment and Municipal Solid Waste Management can be supported by a computerised decision support tool, called FEASIBLE, that facilitates the iterative process of balancing the required finance with the available finance. FEASIBLE has been developed by COWI in close cooperation with OECD and financed by Dancee.

The key feature of FEASIBLE is the use of generic expenditure functions. These expenditure functions allow easy estimation of the expenditure needs of alternative service and environmental targets with a limited data collection effort.

The first version of the model, a spreadsheet based version for water and wastewater, was released in 2001. The new version of the model FEASIBLE Version 2 is a stand alone application based on a database. FEASIBLE Version 2 is released in March 2003.

The presentation will cover:

• Environmental Financing Strategies
• FEASIBLE, the decision support tool for elaboration of Environmental Financing Strategies
• Main results from application of Environmental Financing Strategies and FEASIBLE in transition countries