Project description
The pathway towards more sustainable Europe requires accurate, comprehensive and timely environmental statistics to monitor the progress and decide on policy actions. The production of these statistics requires innovative use of new data sources and methods. This project targets on four domains of environmental-economic statistics and accounts: ecosystems, road transport air emissions, water, and plastic packaging waste.
Overall objectives
Develop methods for producing the above-mentioned statistics and accounts, integrating new and established data sources as well as adapting for national context where necessary, while conforming to the requirements and methodological guidance set by Eurostat. The second objective is to produce and publish the accounts and related datasets.
Work package 2 – Ecosystem Extent Accounts
A new amendment to the statistical regulation (EU) 691/2011 was approved by the European Parliament and the Council in December 2024. Each EU member state is required to submit first accounts for the reference year 2024 by the end of 2026. This means that also Finland needs to be prepared and have the necessary tools, methods and data available and tested for the reporting. Here, the focus is to prepare for and build capacity of Finland for the new requirements set by the regulation, focusing on ecosystem extent. Specific objectives are to finalize the Finnish ecosystem typology and cross-walk to EU typology, develop reusable workflows to enrich the thematic detail of existing national land use and land cover data to create “accounting-ready” ecosystem type maps, use this data for reporting extent, create a harmonizing workflow for a series of ecosystem type maps, and create a workflow for analysing ET conversions.
Work package 3 – Road Transport Air Emission Accounts
Finnish Environment Institute acts as the National Inventory Agency in reporting air pollutant emission inventories annually under the UNECE Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Convention (CLRTAP) and the EU National Emission Reduction Commitments Directive (NECD). In addition to the emission inventories, also future emission projections (SO2, NOx, NH3, NMVOC, PM2,5 and black carbon) are regularly reported to the CLRTAP and NECD. COPERT model has recently been implemented in estimating road transport emissions both in the Finnish greenhouse gas and air pollutant emission inventories. Here, the work focuses on future projections of air pollutant emissions of road transport. Specific aims are to adopt the COPERT model to estimate projected road transport air pollutant emissions for Finland, and produce estimates of projected road transport air pollutant emissions for 2025 to 2050 to be reported to the CLRTAP and NECD. In addition to the road transport emission projections, the some of the input data and parameters for the historical emission inventories will be updated. This will contribute to the Road transport air emission accounts reporting.
Work package 4 - Water and Plastic Packaging Waste Accounts
The first national water accounts were prepared in 2017-2018. They describe water abstraction and use in approximately 200 industries and households in 2010. The accounts specify the source of the abstracted water (fresh surface water, groundwater and seawater as well as network water) and the purpose of use (cooling water and other uses). In this project, the water accounts will be updated for 2015, 2019 and 2022. After this, changes in water use and water efficiency by industry can be assessed in the period 2010-2022. The study answers questions about determining the update frequency of water accounts and changes in water efficiency by industry. The packaging accounts meet the obligation for EU member states to report the amounts of packaging and packaging waste placed on the market using two different methods. Syke has previously developed a method for calculating the amount of packaging placed on the market. This project investigates the possibilities of combining the above-mentioned method with national accounts data to calculate how packaging placed on the market in one industry ends up in either the same or other industries or households and becomes packaging waste there. The aim is to determine whether this method can reliably calculate the amounts of packaging waste generated in industries and households.
This work is funded by the European Union through Eurostat SMP Action Grants (SMP-ESS-2025-SUSTAINABILITY-IBA, Project Number 101262067).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or Eurostat. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
