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EU member states are to face much stronger and broader requirements to report on their implementation of the environmental laws under a directive being drafted by the European Commission. The initiative is designed to boost the information basis for environmental policy making in the future.
Representatives of the Commission, the European environment agency (EEA) and EU statistical agency Eurostat debated the draft proposals last week at an event organised by the Danish presidency. The Commission expects to issue a formal proposal early next year.
Whereas some reporting requirements already exist for some environmental laws, the new directive will require reporting on implementation of all green legislation. Furthermore its requirements will extend to whether implementation achieved the law's environmental objectives - ex-post policy evaluation - and to information necessary to establish the state, trends, driving forces and pressures on the environment.
The directive is expected to have an impact on reporting under UN environmental conventions as well as on EU member states. "I would expect that our initiative directly or indirectly leads to more internationally agreed reporting", Commission official David Grant Lawrence told last week's gathering. UN convention secretariats could even be asked to bring reporting conventions into line with the EU
model, another official told Environment Daily.
The EU's current framework for reporting on environmental law implementation is enshrined in the 1991 "reporting directive". The Commission promised improvements in its proposal for a sixth EU environmental action programme, spurred on by criticisms of the existing rules from both the EEA and European parliament.
In his presentation, Mr Grant Lawrence said that the new environmental reporting directive would provide guiding principles and quality requirements for environmental reporting under EU legislation. To improve effectiveness, it would "organise reporting around a number of environmental clusters or themes," rather than leaving it to fragmented reporting requirements in individual environmental laws.
Building on this foundation, detailed reporting requirements would be drawn up by Commission-chaired committees - the EU's so-called comitology procedure. These committees should have "full involvement of all those having an interest" in EU environmental reporting.
According to an official, reporting on waste and nature laws is likely to be most strengthened by the new directive. In a few cases, such as the water framework directive's reporting framework and a regulation on waste statistics, the lessons had already been learned, Mr Grant Lawrence said last week.
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