Report from the Commission to the European Parliament and the Council. Regulation (EU) No 691/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 July 2011 on European environmental economic accounts

Article 10 of Regulation (EU) No 691/2011 (the “Regulation”) requires the Commission by 31 December 2013 and every 3 years thereafter, to submit a report on the implementation of this Regulation to the European Parliament and the Council. That report shall evaluate in particular the quality of the data transmitted, the data collection methods, the administrative burden on the Member States and on the respondent units, as well as the feasibility and effectiveness of those statistics.

This Regulation was the first Union Regulation on environmental accounting. It introduced three modules
- air emission accounts showing 14 different gases by 64 industry groups and by households
- environmental taxes distinguishing 4 tax types - on energy, transport (other than fuel) pollution, resources - all broken down into 64 industry groups, households and non-residents who pay these taxes
- material flow accounts for 50 material types showing domestic extraction, imports and exports. Then, Domestic Material Consumption = domestic extraction + imports – exports, for each type of material and in total.

These three were the modules that were most mature statistically and they correspond to important environmental policy needs; air emissions and climate change, economic instruments to limit pollution, and resource efficiency. At the time this first Regulation was discussed in and subsequently adopted by the European Parliament and the Council, users in the Parliament and the Commissions DGs emphasised that these first three modules were to be seen as a beginning and that the policy needs for environmental accounting went much further.

The Regulation set the date of submitting this first report at 31 December 2013, which allowing the necessary time for adoption, translation and other processes means that this report had to be drafted at a time when the first data delivered under the Regulation was not yet available. A proper assessment of the quality of the data, the data collection methods, etc. will be carried out in early 2014.

EUR-Lex: COM(2013)864: Follow the progress of this report through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2013:864:FIN

---