European Environment Agency

The impacts of agricultural, environmental and climate change policies in Europe are investigated using the CAPRI (Common Agricultural Policy Regionalised Impact) model. Although the model runs at a regional level, primarily NUTS2, the underlying data have been spatially disaggregated to finer scale units called 'Farm Structure Units'. In this study we present these spatially disaggregated layers of agri-environmental variables for a time series from 2000 to 2018. This harmonized and spatially consistent data set includes crop types (area, yield), livestock types (totals and densities) and various parameters associated with nitrogen application and losses. These data can be used to calculate nitrogen budgets as well as providing inputs to biogeochemical or land management models.

Ambient air pollution remains the leading environmental health risk in Europe. According to the European Environment Agency (EEA), 96% of the urban population in the EU was exposed to annual PM2.5 levels exceeding WHO guidelines in 2022. The environmental burden of disease (EBD) method is widely used to assess population health impacts. In collaboration with the European Topic Centre “Human Health and the Environment” (ETC HE), the EEA conducted EBD assessments for PM2.5, nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone. Here we present the disease burden attributable to long-term PM2.5 and NO2 exposure in Europe for the year 2022. Using WHO's EBD framework, cause-specific mortality and morbidity burden was estimated. Nine risk-outcome pairs were selected based on available evidence for causality. Burden indicators included years of life lost (YLL), years lived with disability (YLD), and disability-adjusted life years (DALY). Concentration-response functions were extracted from relevant sources for the risk-outcome pairs, while exposure data (annual mean) were provided by ETC HE partners. Health data (e.g., cause-specific mortality and prevalence) were mainly obtained from Eurostat and the European Health Interview Survey. In 2022, the disease burden attributable to PM2.5 was considerably higher compared to the one due to NO2: 2,703,827 vs. 580,847 DALY. For both pollutants, YLL contributed most to total DALY - 84% for PM2.5 and 58% for NO2. The highest burden due to PM2.5 resulted from ischemic heart disease in adults (764,479 DALY), and the lowest from asthma in children (37,768 DALY). For NO2, the highest attributable burden resulted from diabetes in adults (313,491 DALYs), and the lowest from adult asthma (74,717 DALY). Despite improvements in air quality, these findings highlight air pollution as a major public health concern in Europe. PM2.5 has the highest disease burden, warranting further national and European coordinated action to reduce exposures and protect human health.Key messages• Air pollution caused over 2.7 million DALY in Europe in 2022, with PM2.5 as the leading contributor to the disease burden.• While air quality improvements are evident, air pollution remains a major health risk that necessitates more comprehensive actions throughout Europe.

Governments support their fishing sectors through a range of policy mechanisms, some of the most ubiquitous but also least well accounted for are those that reduce the prices fishers pay for fuel by exempting them from certain fuel-related taxes. While applied in the pursuit of objectives such as improved economic performance, tax exemptions result in fuel being under-priced, meaning the negative externalities associated with fuel consumption are not reflected in the price. Under-pricing creates incentives to overconsume fuel, which can negatively impact both environmental and economic performance through overfishing and increased emissions. This paper explores the role fuel taxation policy plays in subsidising the fishing sector. We advocate that the difference between fuel consumption’s negative externality and fuel tax is the proper method to estimate fuel subsidies. To do so, we quantify the subsidies provided under different tax scenarios for a range of management situations, along with outcomes in terms of fuel consumption, fleet capacity, and economic performance. When compared to prices that account for the negative externalities, current policy represents a subsidy of just under one billion euros annually for the EU fishing fleet operating in the Northeast Atlantic. We also find that, even in the absence of tax policy reform, reducing fishing effort to a level compatible with MSY based management objectives would substantially improve profits while reducing fuel consumption. These findings highlight that ensuring management can meet existing objectives and reforming policy so that fuel is no longer under-priced are clear opportunities to improve fishery performance outcomes. • When externalities are included, fuel subsidies are higher than previously estimated. • A tax equal to the social cost of carbon would eliminate harmful fisheries subsidies. • Profits will increase by managing the fishery at MSY despite setting such a fuel tax. • Managing the fishery at MSY results in less CO2 emissions than setting such a fuel tax.

Plastics play an essential role in modern society, but also lead to significant impacts on the environment and climate. Reducing such impacts while retaining the usefulness of plastics requires a shift towards a more circular and sustainable plastics system. This report tells the story of plastics, and their effect on the environment and climate, and looks at their place in a European circular economy.

Heat-health early warning systems (HHWS) are an important collaborative activity between the meteorological and health communities. This study aimed to map the evidence on the socioeconomic assessment of HHWS and their effectiveness in terms of averting heat related health outcomes. It also aimed to map the technical, structural, and societal barriers and facilitators to implementation and use of HHWS. We use two methods: (i) a scoping review of literature on the economic assessment and health benefit of climate services for heat-health adaptation (ii) a set of interviews with climate service developers and providers in Europe and Africa to understand further technical and societal aspects as well as evaluation of such services. We find that HHWS can be a cost-effective adaptation option that can reduce heat-related mortality and morbidity, especially in vulnerable groups like the elderly. We find that challenges such as lack of long-term and reliable funding, difficulties in making the climate data relevant, comprehensible, and accessible to different end-users, cultural differences between climate and health professionals, and limited ability to assess the services' real impact need to be accounted for while implementing these services.

Abstract The first European Climate Risk Assessment (EUCRA), produced by the European Environment Agency in March 2024, engaging nearly 100 authors across Europe, highlights health among the most at-risk sectors. According to the structured risk assessment that was conducted to support the transparent identification of priorities for policy action, more and urgent action is needed to reduce health risks from heat indoors and outdoors; from wildfires and outbreaks of vector- and water-borne diseases. The responsibility for managing risks lies both with the EU and Member States, and the policy readiness varies depending on the risk. The European Climate and Health Observatory, set up to better understand, anticipate and prevent climate risks to human health in Europe, in the most recent report ‘Responding to climate change impacts on human health in Europe: focus on floods, droughts and water quality’ provides in-depth analyses of some climate-related risks to health and presents examples of responses to them in both policy and practice. Both assessments emphasise that without fast and systemic action to increase societal resilience, the health impacts of the changing climate will worsen, affecting already disadvantaged or vulnerable groups the most. Health and health-determining sectors have the opportunity to address the health impacts of climate change by, among others, increasing the climate resilience of health systems; developing, updating and implementing national health adaptation plans; and supporting the education and training of public health and healthcare professionals on climate change threats. At the same time, addressing health impacts from climate extremes requires responses across sectors, actors and spatial scales.

Land use and its change impact food security, carbon cycling, biodiversity, and, hence, the condition of ecosystems to mitigate and adapt to climate change, support economic prosperity, and human well-being. To support and guide policy actions between the economy and the environment, harmonized time series datasets, transparent methodologies, and easily interpretable statistics are needed. Therefore, monitoring of the function and condition of lands and their change, along with properly agreed methodologies and freely accessible data, are essential. The Copernicus Land Monitoring Service has produced over 20 years of Corine Land Cover datasets for 39 countries in Europe, which allows continental-wide harmonized and comparable monitoring and accounting of land cover and land use change at a high thematic resolution and in a long time series (2000–2018). With the upcoming 2024 update, the time series will reach a unique product worldwide in terms of time series length, spatial resolution, extent, and thematic detail, enabling policymakers and the scientific community to address the main anthropogenic drivers of land and ecosystem degradation. This paper describes a unified approach for producing continental-wide land accounts that aligns with internationally agreed-upon standards for measuring the environment and its relationship with the economy. Furthermore, the study provides a harmonized time series of geospatial data for deriving land accounts and provides statistics of land cover and land use status and changes for a twenty-year period. All geospatial data and statistics presented in this paper are freely accessible and downloadable to serve other studies.

The European Union’s Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 (EU BDS) represents a pivotal step forward in the commitment to protect and restore biodiversity, not only within Europe but also at a global scale. In order to reinforce its implementation, an innovative biodiversity knowledge governance has been established. It includes, among other measures, a progress monitoring system that fosters transparency and can inform corrective action to be taken when progress is being reviewed. In this context, we introduce the official, publicly available, online tools at the core of the EU BDS progress monitoring system: the actions tracker and the dashboard. The actions tracker is specifically designed to track progress on the implementation of the more than a hundred actions stemming from the EU BDS, while the dashboard monitors progress across 16 targets using indicators. However, while the actions tracker is a mature tool, the work on the dashboard is still in progress, as indicators are missing for several targets. New scientific input is needed to propel policy tracking and ensure transparent and data-driven monitoring of the EU BDS targets. With this paper, we invite the scientific community to seize this opportunity to actively participate in the policy monitoring process.

Abstract. The Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey (LUCAS) of the European Union (EU) presents a rich resource for detailed understanding of land cover and use, making it invaluable for Earth Observation (EO) applications. This manuscript discusses the recent advancements and improvements in the LUCAS Copernicus module, particularly the data collection process of 2022, its protocol simplifications, and geometry definitions compared to the 2018 survey and data. With approximately 150,000 polygons collected in 2022, an increase from 60,000 in 2018, the LUCAS Copernicus 2022 data provides a unique and comprehensive in-situ dataset for EO applications. The protocol simplification also facilitates a faster and more efficient data collection process. In 2022, there are 137,966 polygons generated, out of the original 149,408 LUCAS Copernicus points, which means 92.3 % of the points were actually surveyed. The data holds 82 land cover classes for the Copernicus module LUCAS level 3 legend (88 classes). For land use the data holds 40 classes, along with 18 classes of land use types. The dataset is available here for download (PID: http://data.europa.eu/89h/e3fe3cd0-44db-470e-8769-172a8b9e8874). The paper further elaborates on the implications of these enhancements and the need for continuous harmonisation to ensure semantic consistency and temporal usability of data across different periods. Moreover, it calls for additional studies exploring the potential of the collected data, especially in the context of remote sensing and computer vision. The manuscript ends with a discussion on future data usage and dissemination strategies.