4: Information Services and Communications

Provide Europe's decision-makers and citizens with the independent information they need to make informed choices about the environment and raise awareness about the environment by communicating our messages in a transparent, understandable way to as broad an audience as possible

Other Information:

The demand for easy to understand, up-to-date information has grown significantly even during the course of the 2004–2008 strategy. This demand comes from both political decision-makers and from European citizens, who increasingly wish to see full transparency with respect to information provided by public bodies. Alongside this development, the rapid evolution in new information technologies provides us with tools to communicate more effectively. Over the next five years the EEA will seek to provide Europe's decision-makers and citizens with the independent information they need to make informed choices about the environment and raise awareness about the environment by communicating our messages in a transparent, understandable way to as broad an audience as possible. The EEA information services and communications are supported by many initiatives across Europe in which the EEA is called upon to provide support, including the Shared Environmental Information System, the Inspire Directive on the provision of spatial information, the Aarhus Convention on access to environmental information and GMES — the EU's technical flagship aimed at improving integration of in-situ and space-based monitoring. Over the course of the Strategy, the EEA aims to ensure its website becomes a world‑recognised portal for providing timely and relevant environmental information on the state and outlook of Europe's environment. The aim is to provide products and services with a high readability, usability and message consistency for the EEA's multilingual user community. The website will evolve from one that stores documents into an interactive site and portal that supports two-way communications and can be effective in helping to improve the quality and spread of environmental education. We will continue to focus on writing regular news items for the web and making the best possible use of multimedia techniques to maximise outreach and impact of EEA messages. Work in this strategic area will be under two themes: • Shared Environmental Information System • Communications

Objective(s):

4.1: Shared Environmental Information System

4.2: Communications

Content