Archive:Environmental regional data introduced
This Statistics Explained article is outdated and has been archived - for recent articles on environment see here.
Regional environmental statistics are a necessary means to assess environmental policy. They complement statistics on national level and they are more useful to explain "micro-phenomena" in a lot of cases.
Upon formal request of the European Commission Directorate-General for Regional Policy (DG REGIO) for the establishment of regional environmental statistics on water and waste, Eurostat decided back in 2009 to develop a new data collection for this purpose.
DG Environment and the European Environment Agency (EEA) were contacted as well for their statistical needs, and in consultation with the respective domain experts in Eurostat, the resulting long 'wish list' was boiled down to a manageable size with parameters deemed to be 'feasible'.
The final "Regional environmental data collection" (REQ2010) then encompassed 149 elements from the following domains:
- inland freshwater (resources, abstractions, use, wastewater treatment, generation and discharge of pollutants);
- municipal waste (generation and treatment);
- land use (contaminated sites; residencies);
- energy (production and consumption);
- transport (individual transport and length of commuting trips);
- environmental expenditure (industry and public sector, by environmental domain).
The "Regional environmental data collection" (REQ2010) was launched in June 2010, deadline for responses was set 31 October 2010. Eurostat asked for data for the latest available year (2008 / 2009) and, if possible, a time series starting in 2000.
The aggregation level requested was generally NUTS 2, and in addition the water parameters, at the request of DG Environment and the EEA, were also collected for river basin districts (RBD) and their corresponding sub-units as defined in the implementation process of Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC.
A second "Regional environmental data collection" is planned to be launched in June 2012. The list of parameters of this data collection will be shlightly modified due to experience gained during the first exercise.