3.2: Regional and Global Assessment

To plan, prepare, contribute to and deliver regional assessments in support of various policies and political processes in line with EEA's long-term Strategy for integrated assessments and 5-year reporting.

Other Information:

Analysis - Common geographical and environmental patterns characterise specific areas in Europe, such as coastal regions or mountain ranges. They correspond on the one hand to the reality of Europe's landscape diversity and, on the other, to some form of targeted processes and policies or more generally territorial cohesion. Analysing the environmental status of these diverse areas, such as coastal, urban, rural, mountain, is thus rooted in the particular socio-economic characteristics of the different areas and current and historical land use patterns. This has important consequences as many policies and decision-making scenarios need to consider a wide range of interactions; for example urban sprawl into rural areas; the impact of urbanisation in coastal areas on ecosystems services; the role of mountain agriculture in maintaining high-value nature farmland. The EEA is involved in the production of a number of regional assessments and State of Environment reporting processes. Examples include work under the European Neighbourhood Policy and Central Asia Strategy; the coordination and production of a scorecard in the context of the Mediterranean Horizon 2020 process, to measure progress on the basis of an agreed set of indicators; the UNGA global assessment of assessments to develop a regular process for assessing the marine environment and assessments for the Arctic and key ecosystems such as wetlands and alpine areas. Action - We will achieve our objective by: • providing links and easy access to SEIS, Reportnet and the various tools for undertaking integrated assessments to enable others in the wider community make best use of these developments; • cooperating with Mediterranean Action Programme, Eurostat and other partners to organise a regular reporting process under Horizon 2020, publishing five-yearly and biennial reports on the Mediterranean environment; • planning and preparing the fifth pan-European assessment report; • participating in the UNGA assessment of assessments for the marine environment, UNEP-GEO, other UNEP DEWA activities and other UN assessments via expert groups and chairmanship of panels; • identifying the needs for and providing specific tailor-made assessments on the state of the Arctic environment; • identifying the needs for and developing relevant assessments to support Cohesion policies, spatial planning and areas defined by their ecological relatedness (e.g. coasts, inland seas, urban, rural and mountain areas); and • improving communication and dissemination on the importance and basis of integrated assessment via multi-media, user-friendly, multilingual information.

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

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