October 2003

The European Environment Agency’s well-designed website is the gateway to a vast amount of information on the state of our environment. Meanwhile, the Commission’s Enterprise DG takes care of the greening of business.

Though formally an EU body, the EEA is open to all European countries and currently has 31 members. Its site at http://www.eea.eu.int offers environmental data on 52 countries throughout Europe and the former Soviet Union, browsable either country by country, or by any of 30 different themes. State-of-the-environment indicators are available on about a hundred topics from access to basic services to waste generation.
All the EEA reports are here too, including Europe's environment: the third assessment and its summaries in 25 languages. And, in this learning paradise, most pages include a sidebar defining key terms, which links to a glossary in 23 languages.

Concerned to ensure that sustainable development marches hand in hand with competitiveness, the Enterprise DG is active on a wide variety of business-related environmental issues, from whether compliance with the Kyoto Protocol will affect SMEs to environmental benchmarking, via the distinction between relative and absolute decoupling (see "indicators"). The current headline is the proposed framework directive on the eco-design of energy-using products. See http://europa.eu.int/comm/enterprise/environment

Meanwhile, information on the EU's environmental activities in general can be found at http://europa.eu.int/pol/env/index_en.htm which links to institutional websites, policy summaries and legal texts. The key issues are set out digestibly in the downloadable leaflet Choices for a Greener Future.