Learning about Environmental Outcomes in Europe

The access to high-quality, interoperable and granular data is key to the advancement of research and policy analysis in the environmental domain, which in turn aids steering Europe towards fulfilment of Green Deal objectives. An adaptive EU legal framework and the combined efforts of Member States and other data-holding institutions are supporting the creation and improvement of harmonised environmental data. Several hurdles persist, including (i) heterogeneity in data harmonisation and sharing practices across countries; (ii) delays between data collection and data availability for analysis; (iii) the challenging integration of environmental data stemming from mixed sources. Every improvement along these dimensions appears a worthy undertaking, given the superiority of insights obtained from analyses based on high-quality data incorporating administrative environmental sources.