Latest ETC Reports (included in homepage)

Lead exposure in Europe has fallen substantially, but it remains an important public-health concern. This report combines harmonised human biomonitoring data with environmental, dietary, behavioural and socioeconomic covariates to reconstruct population blood lead concentrations across a 34-country European study area for 2000–2019 and estimate attributable burden of disease. Population-weighted blood lead concentrations were around 60% lower in 2012–2019 than in 2000–2006. For adult all-cause mortality, the estimated burden was about 62,500 attributable deaths annually using a 2 µg/dL counterfactual and about 310,000 using the primary 1 µg/dL counterfactual. The report highlights remaining data gaps and the need for representative biomonitoring, action on legacy contamination and continued control of current lead sources.

Data reported by companies on the production, import, export and destruction of fluorinated greenhouse gases in the European Union, 2007-2025

This report assesses the suitability of Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS) datasets for quantifying urban vegetation across the European Union, in support of biomass carbon stock and GHG fluxes estimation under the LULUCF sub-categories settlements remaining settlements and land converted to settlements. It applies the methodological framework of the 2006 IPCC Guidelines and the 2019 Refinement and responds to the reporting requirements of the Governance Regulation (EU) 2018/1999, supporting Member States in upgrading their LULUCF GHG inventory methods to at least Tier 2. As its main output, the analysis identifies the most suitable combinations of CLMS datasets for delineating settlement area outlines and quantifying crown cover for each Member State. Settlement area figures derived from CLMS data are benchmarked against official areas reported in the National Inventory Reports (NIRs). The comparison reveals differences in dataset performance across Member States and shows that no single combination is optimal for all countries. Crown cover area figures, largely unreported in Member States’ LULUCF submissions, are compared with independent estimates from Liu et al. (2023). The report provides country-specific recommendations for quantifying urban vegetation using harmonised, openly available Earth observation (EO) data. The results of the analysis are available as additional documents at the end of this page: 1) Summary statistics of settlement area by country, and selection of the best-fitting CLMS data combination; 2) Share of urban tree crown cover by country using various CLMS datasets; 3) Comparison of CLMS-based urban tree crown cover estimates with Liu et al. (2023). This report was developed together with the ETC CM Guidance for estimating GHG emissions and removals of biomass in Settlements, which focuses on the policy aspects and implementation of the LULUCF requirements, with recommendations for inventory compilers less familiar with EO and CLMS data. This report is its technical complement, providing an in-depth geospatial analysis of woody vegetation in settlements, with detailed statistical analysis and practical examples.

This report explores different approaches for an economic valuation of the environmental burden of disease (EBD) due to air pollution and calculates the associated health costs for the results quantified by the EEA’s EBD for the year 2022. Health costs can be defined as being composed of direct costs (health treatment), indirect costs (productivity loss) and intangible costs (utility loss). Studies that value health impacts of air pollution typically start from the quantification of the change in incidence of disease, which is monetised using estimates of the average health cost of illness over its duration. The focus of the EEA’s EBD on air pollution is not on change in incidence but rather on change in DALYs or the single components YLL (Years of Life Lost) and YLD (Years Lived with Disability). This requires adaptation of methods previously used in studies assessing monetised health benefits, to value the outputs of the EEA’s EBD on air pollution. The YLL component is frequently monetised using the value of statistical life year (VOLY) covering utility loss only. Direct and indirect costs would ideally apply to the YLD component. How this can be done is explored in the report. The nature of this work is exploratory, with the purpose of demonstrating possible approaches to valuing EBD of air pollution economically. Results are, therefore, preliminary and subject to change as values are refined.