ENVIRONMENTAL STATISTICS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL-POLICY - GENEALOGY AND DATA QUALITY

Environmental statistics provide an important input to environmental p olicy, at the regional, national and international scale. The collatio n of environmental statistics, however, is fraught with difficulties, due to the wide range of environmental phenomena, data sources and age ncies 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 st atistics on atmospheric emissions, air quality and wastes. On the basi s of these examples, the implications of errors and inconsistencies in environmental statistics are discussed in relation to environmental p olicy, monitoring and research.