European Environment Agency Developments of Land and Ecosystem Accounts: General Overview

Abstract

The European Environment Agency has started the implementation of a programme of land use and ecosystem accounts, following the System of Environmental and Economic Accounts (SEEA) guidelines of the United Nations. The purpose is to integrate information across the various ecosystem components and to support further assessments and modeling of these components and their interactions with economic and social developments. This programme reflects the increasing demand for environmental policy integration in Europe, both vertically through thematic policies as well as horizontally across policies in those sectors that contribute most to environmental impacts. The construction of land and ecosystem accounts is now feasible due to continuous improvements in monitoring, collecting and processing data and progress with the development of statistical methods that facilitate data assimilation and integration. The accounts are based on explicit spatial patterns provided by comprehensive land cover accounts that can be upscaled and downscaled using a 1km² grid to any type of administrative region or ecosystem zone (e.g., river basin catchments, coastal zones or bio- geographic areas). Land cover accounts have been produced for 24 countries in Europe and published in EEA Report in 2006.