Implementation of the Environmental Data Centres

Date of issue: 21 September 2007611th Director’s Meeting of 3rd October 2007

Doc. 611_1.3

Implementation of the Environmental Data Centres

Authors:Elisabeth MØLLGAARD, Karin JORDAN, Jörg HANAUER, Daniel RASE, Wim KLOEK, Christian HEIDORN

Head of Unit: Gilles DECAND

Director: Pieter EVERAERS

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1. Purpose

In November 2005, a Technical Arrangement on the Environmental Data Centres (DCs) was signed between the partners of the 'Group of Four' (Go4): DG Environment, the European Environment Agency (EEA), the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and Eurostat.

Ten Data Centres were foreseen in the document and the following division of responsibilities for the short and medium term was agreed:

–EEA will act as Data Centre for air, climate change, water, biodiversity and land use;

–JRC will act as Data Centre for soil and forestry;

–ESTAT will act as the Data Centre naturalresources,productsand waste.

Eurostat is therefore committed to develop its three DCs in close co-operation with the Go4 partners. This commitment has been integrated into the annual work programmes of 2006 and 2007 and is the main challenge for the Unit "Environment Statistics and Accounts" in the five-year programme 2008-2012.

The four documents in annex contain the ex-ante evaluations describing the first phase (2008 – 2010) of the implementation of the ESTAT Data Centres. The first three cover the contents of the future Data Centres, the fourth one, more horizontal, is related to the IT aspects.

1. Expected outcome

The Directors' Meeting is invited to adopt the four ex-ante evaluations in annex, to approve the approach, to allow the necessary resources and to authorise the implementation of the work so that the project may proceed to the detailed planning phase.

1. Problem statement

Up to now, product-related environmental policies have tended to focus on large point sources of pollution, such as industrial emissions or waste management issues. However, there is clearly a need to address the environmental impact of products, in an integrated way, throughout their life-cycle (from extraction to production, consumption, end-of-life treatment including recycling and final disposal of remaining waste).

The EurostatDCs: natural resources, products and waste cover three different phases of this life-cycle. There is a strong link between them and therefore a good reason to manage them together.

The pre-study on the implementation of ESTAT Data Centres carried out during the first half of 2007 gave the opportunity to interview the main stakeholders and to clarify the DC concept.

According to the recommendations of the study, the general objectives of each ESTAT Data Centre should be as follows:

–To be the reference point for answering to specific policy questions related to statistical information on the topic concerned (natural resources, product or waste) and the associated environmental impacts;

–To develop and coordinate the necessary methodologies to produce statistical data, information and indicators on the environmental impacts taking a life-cycle perspective, in co-operation with the other Go4 partners;

–To manage data, perform quality assurance and co-ordinate data and information managed by other bodies (e.g. Go4, other EU Institutions, international organisations such as OECD, UN, etc.);

–To provide data and information for the assessment of policy effectiveness.

From the description above, it appears that the scope and mandate of the Data Centres go beyond standard Eurostat's responsibilities, inter alia by requiring information on the associatedenvironmental impacts:

– of the use of natural resources,

– from production and use of products,

– and of waste management,

taking a life-cycle perspective and coordinating data and information managed by other bodies. Considering a stepwise approach for the implementation of the Data Centres, this will certainly have consequences on human and financial resources in the short, medium and long term.

The implementation of the DCs will also have an impact on the IT environment. The Go4 decided to have a common distributed architecture for the ten Data Centres. The DCs of ESTAT will need to be integrated withthe other onesthat do not follow ESTAT CVD architecture and will or already have a different dissemination environment. Moreover, it has been decided to have a unique Web portal for the DCs and whenever possible a common 'look and feel'.

1. Proposed action/solution

During the last DIMESA[1] meeting (6 June 2007), an update was presented on the implementation of the ten Data Centres. The most advanced ones (Soil, Forest and Water) are already running or should become available by the end of 2007. This situation is mainly due to the fact that realisations carried out since four or five years have been renamed to Data Centres.

The situation in Eurostat is quite different. The results of the pre-study show that the scope of the Waste DC is quite well defined but there is still a lot of preliminary work to be carried out to clarify the contents of the other two.

The scope of the Data Centre on Products is maybe the most difficult one to shape because the concept of "product" is broad and includes both goods and services.The Data Centre on Products has close relations with the other Data Centres managed by ESTAT and at times the delimitations are not clear. Other close ties will be to the JRC/IES and the world of LCA researchers, where most development of both methodology and data will take place. In building the Products Data Centre Eurostat will be highly depending on these partners. Only to a certain degree capacity building in the area of LCA will be taking place at Eurostat.

In the case of the DC on Natural Resources, the term "natural resource" is very broad and vaguely defined. Someparts could possibly be covered (through MFA and cooperation with other DCs) some parts will need research (e.g. wind, geothermal, tidal and solar energy). This Data Centre will also require careful border setting in order to avoid double work and to ensure synergies withthe other Eurostat and Go4 Data Centres.

The Thematic Strategy on the sustainable use of natural resources describes the needs from a future Data Centre on natural resources as a lead or central service to act as an “information hub” bringing together all available, relevant information, to monitor and analyse it and to provide policy relevant information to decision makers. This definition broadens the scope of the Data Centre on natural resources in comparison to the other two Eurostat Data Centres.

The European waste policy has already at its service a series of programs, information systems and tools. In relation to data collection, data bases, data processing and reporting a number of ongoing and future activities of the Go4 can be identified. That is why the implementation of the DC on Waste is the ideal candidate for a pilot project.

In order to have a pragmatic approach during this first phase of the implementation of the ESTAT Data Centres, the emphasis will be put on the following short term objectives:

–To identify, for each Data Centre, key players and to clarify the requirements of the main users (during phase one, first priority should be given to DG ENV and the two other Go4 partners);

–To identify, for each Data Centre the main sources of statistical data among the Go4 partners and beyond and to build up a distributed database environment that will be the core of the DCs infrastructure;

–To build up the Waste Data Centre as a pilot for defining the IT infrastructure and organisation for the two others;

–To develop methodological approaches and formulate research needs (e.g. to create time series and modelling procedures to overcome information gaps), and to develop new indicators.

1. Resource impact

Human resources

The screening exercise already recognised the growing importance of environmental statistics and accounts. On that basis, an internal reallocation of three posts has been realised in 2007 within Directorate E. But Eurostat needs now to build up internal expertise that will require additional staff capacities to coordinate the work of the Data Centres and the contributions related to the activities of the other Go4 members. Requests will be handled directly, forwarded to the other Go4 partners having the relevant expertise or to third parties under contract with ESTAT.

Summary table of additional resources needed to manage the ESTAT Data Centres:

A total of nine additional posts is required for the implementation and the management of the data centres before the end of 2010. Three posts will be made available in 2008via internal reallocation of staff within Directorate E. Two posts have been requested through the APS 2008 human resources bid to be allocated to climate change and they can be reallocated to the data centres if they are made available. Further reflection in unit E3 and in the Directorate E (and eventually in the context of repeating the screening exercise, in the DG as a whole) will be necessary to cover the four remaining posts.

Financial resources

Summary table of resources needed until the end of phase 1 (end 2009)

1. Timetable

The ex-ante documents in annex contain the detailed timetable for each Data Centre.

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[1]DIMESA: Directors' Meeting for Environment Statistics and Accounts