Capacity building on UNFC by the EU ICE SRM

The European Critical Raw Materials Act, which entered into force on 23 May 2024, brought a need for reporting of the critical raw materials projects by the Member States to the European Commission, using the UNFC.
In response to this need, the EU International Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Resource Management (EU ICE SRM – in establishment) has developed a UNFC Train-the-Trainer programme as part of the GSEU - Geological Service for Europe project activities. The goal was to train the experts from the European geological survey organisations (GSO) to apply the UNFC and further disseminate the knowledge they have acquired at the national level.

The training programme used a three-level approach:

Level 1 - General principles: the training designed for broad audience with diverse levels of knowledge on UNFC addresses related concepts, international reporting standards and their links to UNFC using practical examples;

Level 2 - User need specifics: designed for practitioners it builds up on Level 1 covering various cases. The course enables participants to apply UNFC classification independently;

Level 3 - Qualification: building up on Level 2 training and participants deepen their knowledge and are finely able to pass it on.
Each training programme level was structured within 2-day educational workshops and successfully held for the first time in April, May and June 2024 at the Geological Survey of Slovenia in Ljubljana. Over 30 experts from various European countries were trained by the skilled trainers from Finish, German, Austrian, Norwegian, Swedish, Czech, Hungarian, Slovenian and French GSO.