Dear Rural Pact community members,

We are happy to inform you that the rural observatory is now accessible. More and better data are essential to understand the rural dimension of economic, social and demographic challenges and to act on them. The Joint Research Center has developed in collaboration with DG AGRI and DG REGIO this single stop shop to visualise the data that we have and improve data collection and analysis on rural areas.  

The rural observatory is part of the brand new Rural vision website that we launch also today with informative pages grouping in one place all rural vision related actions. We will continue developing it with the objective to add collaborative tools and build an interactive platform serving the needs of the whole Rural Pact Community and the rural revitalisation platform.

The observatory includes the following functionalities:

1. Rural focus – it allows the visualisation of an indicator for a given year with a value for urban, intermediate and rural areas by Member State. You can pick the indicator, the type of territorial typology and the year. When possible, we have opted for the degree of urbanisation, typology, which offers a high spatial resolution (operates below the NUTS 3 level). Besides, you can choose the type of display and download the data and the graph. For information about the level of analysis or the time period, check the “metadata” tag.
2. My place – data for the regions at different territorial levels. You can see on the map the rural local administrative units in the territory appearing in green.  On the side, you can visualise the evolution of the main indicators available at this territorial level organised by topic. The graphs display the indicator comparing it with other EU averages.
3. Trends – allows the visualisation of the evolution of an indicator over time for the whole of Europe. You can select the territorial level of interest and compare the situation of diverse regions or municipalities in Europe by using the function “compare”.
4. Analysis – we will publish every year several research papers on different aspects of rural life.

The rural observatory is a work in progress. We will progressively add more data, improve certain functionalities and link with existing interesting resources. Before promoting the observatory more widely from January onwards, we would value your input. Feel welcome to contact the rural observatory team via JRC-KCTP@ec.europa.eu or the site.

We wish you a nice journey through these new pages!

The rural vision team