Environmental Statistics for Environmental Policy: Genealogy and Data Quality

Environmental statistics provide an important input to environmental policy, at the regional, national and international scale. The collation of environmental statistics, however, is fraught with difficulties, due to the wide range of environmental phenomena, data sources and agencies involved. As a result, published statistics are liable to suffer from significant problems of error and non-comparability. This paper examines the genealogy of national environmental statistics in Europe, and illustrates some of the quality issues involved in relation to statistics on atmospheric emissions, air quality and wastes. On the basis of these examples, the implications of errors and inconsistencies in environmental statistics are discussed in relation to environmental policy, monitoring and research.