funded by the European Commission (Directorate-General Research) under the 6th Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development in close cooperation with Directorate-General Environment Contract No: 022580 (SSPE)   BACKGROUND The European Environment and Health Strategy adopted by the European Commission in 2003 presented a new vision on how to address environment and health in an integrated way and puts health in the centre of environmental policy. Based upon the Strategy the Commission adopted in 2004 a Communication on the Environment and Health Action Plan 2004 – 2010. In Action 3 of this Action Plan the European Commission announces to develop a coherent approach to Human Biomonitoring in Europe in close cooperation with the Member States. For the implementation of Action 3 the Commission has set up a Technical Working Group on HBM (TWG), consisting of HBM experts from several MS including Croatia. This TWG has been expanded to include more Member States and is now called the Implementation Group (IG). Given the complexity of the issues a STEP-BY-STEP approach has been set up: The first step (2004-2006) consists of the technical preparation of the European Pilot Project. For this reason the EU Commission has launched the ESBIO project, scheduled for 24 months. The project team consists of nearly all members of the Implementation Group on Human Biomonitoring. Concerning the second step - to test out the developed coordinated approaches - a call is currently published within the EU 7th Research Framework Programme to establish a EU wide network on Human Biomonitoring.