SEIS Impact Assessment

The European Commission has published an accompanying documents to the communication paper "Towards a Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS)".
The Impact Assessment has been amended to take account of the recommendations of the Impact Assessment Board. In particular:
• more details are provided on plans for updating the standardised reporting directive 91/692/EEC, including an assessment of which reporting obligations could be repealed with this update, and what streamlining would be left to updates of the thematic legislation;
• the specific objectives and options have been streamlined and reduced in number; time horizons have been given for the specific objectives, and options are more clearly linked to the specific objectives;
• text has been included to explain more clearly how effectiveness, efficiency and feasibility considerations have been taken into account when assessing options;
• positive impacts on citizens' rights of access to available information, as well as potential reorganisation of public administrations, have been highlighted more clearly.

The Executive Summary of the Impact Assessment gives an overview of the rather volumunuos paper.

Towards a Shared Environmental Information System (SEIS)

A Communication of the European Commission sets out an approach to modernise and simplify the collection, exchange and use of the data and information required for the design and implementation of environmental policy, according to which the current, mostly centralised systems for reporting are progressively replaced by systems based on access, sharing and interoperability. The overall aim is to maintain and improve the quality and availability of information required for environmental policy, in line with better regulation, while keeping the associated
administrative burdens to a minimum.
In the first place, a set of principles are proposed on the basis of which the collection, exchange and use of environmental data and information should be organised in the future. A key step in the implementation of this approach will be to modernise the way in which information required in various pieces of environmental legislation is made available, through a legislative instrument to be proposed in 2008 which will probably take the form of a revision to the current "standardised reporting directive" 91/692/EC.

In an older report the European Environment Agency proposed in 2002(!) the development of an environmental information structure to reduce the reporting burden in order to allow for better use and reuse of the information reported. That report was first and foremost about cooperation between operating networks such as the EEA/EIONET, the European Commission, the OECD and the various international conventions. It was then hoped that the initiative should add a new dimension to their cooperation in order to attain a shared European environment information system (EEIS). Under this umbrella, they should define and share a common understanding and goals, largely in the form of an information structure, which each organisation can use for its own purposes as well as to support the overall goals.