The EMLA Foundation for Environmental Education brings students together from across the country to work on major environmental projects utilizing a multidisciplinary, teamwork approach focused on experiential learning. This year EMLA Environmental Management Coordinator Csaba Sándor led the eleven-student group on a highly ambitious Geographical Information Systems (GIS) project. The students analyzed environmental conditions on the twohundred square kilometer watershed of the Rákos-patak (a river originating northeast of Budapest at Gödöllô and flowing into the Danube). Goals of the project included: assessing the illegal waste dumping sites on the watershed; studying the waste management of municipalities on the watershed; prioritizing sites by severity of environmental damages; providing strategies for restoring damaged areas; and creating an analytical model that can be reproduced at low cost throughout the country.

Students created pollution sensitivity maps and site maps which were used together to determine areas of priority interest. They also developed a website using GIS-based visualization for posting of projects results. Final products included a written study and a CD-ROM including a database of waste dumping sites and remediation suggestions of technical, legal, and economic natures. (Project funds came from the Central Environment Fund of Hungary, the Kellner Fund, Pro Renovanda Cultura Hungariae Foundation, and the Municipality of Budapest, with in-kind contributions provided by two local firms, Bekes Ltd. and Landinfo Ltd.) DUNA TV followed Csaba Sándor and the students to the field and visited EMLA in order to produce a feature on the project which will air later this year.

The topic for the new group of students during the 2000-2001 academic year will be the Tisza Lake in the aftermath of the cyanide spill on the Tisza River.

We hosted top students from Hungary and from a US law school who came to EMLA to work on various projects relating to their studies and EMLA's work as an international environmental and legal advocacy NGO. This year EMLA hosted a number of Hungarian interns including Zoltán Kovács and Krisztina Loncsár and one US law school intern, Noah Bilenker, from Columbia University Law School, who worked on the Aarhus Convention implementation process in Hungary. Next year we hope to host more interns.

For the second straight year EMLA attorneys taught at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University where EMLA President Gyula Bándi is head of the Environmental Law Department. The courses taught focused on Private Law and Environmental Law. EMLA attorneys continued to teach at the ELTE Faculty of Law, where Gyula is also a professor of law, for the sixth consecutive year.

EMLA congratulates our own attorneys Csaba Kiss and Éva Tengely on receiving their degrees. Csaba received a degree in Environmental Engineering with a specialization in Environmental Management from the Technical University of Budapest. Éva, who joined EMLA as an attorney last year, passed the bar exam in June, 2000.