Modernisation of Environmental Reporting as a Tool to Enhance the European Commission’s Power to Monitor Compliance

Recent reforms in the reporting and monitoring process, in particular enabled by advances in digital technology, have made three main contributions to the European Commission’s power to monitor member states’ compliance with EU environmental law. First, a quicker data transmission by the member states facilitates the Commission’s assessment of whether they have fulfilled EU legal obligations. Improvements in this regard have been achieved by legislative amendments, the transformation of the European Environmental Agency into a hub for data processing and first operationalisations of data harvesting at EU level, a technological solution to access data at national or local level without the need for active reporting by member states. Instead, software programmes automatically extract large amount of data from national websites, providing the Commission with faster and more flexible access to data, while minimizing the reporting obligations for the member states. Second, the regulatory monitoring capacity of the Commission benefits from access to more accurate, more comparable and more user-friendly data. In the past, a lack of comparability of member states’ reports was a challenge for the Commission when assessing their implementation performance. According to the Commission’s 2017 fitness check of 181 reporting obligations, in 58 pieces of EU environmental legislation, the comparability of the member states’ situation could be enhanced by an improved use of indicators in 86 per cent of reports, and by the use of indicators rather than hard-to-analyse textual information in 76 per cent of reports. To this end, the Commission suggested legislative amendments that reduced textual information in the member states’ implementation reports in favour of more indicator-based reporting. This contributes to a better comparability across member states, which in turn, facilitates a faster evaluation of member states’ compliance. In addition, a better data basis allows the Commission to suggest more targeted capacity building measures, for instance, in the framework of the Environmental Implementation Review. Finally, new data stemming from other sources than the member states contribute to the Commission’s power to monitor the situation in the member states. Such data allow a verification of the validity of the member states’ information, and enable the Commission to accede data earlier than foreseen in the member states’ reporting obligations. In this regard, Copernicus, the EU’s earth observation and monitoring programme, consisting of a constellation of EU-owned satellites, offers the Commission new monitoring opportunities. Thematic information obtained through Copernicus provides real-time data on the status of the environment in the member states. Consequently, if the Commission detects deterioration with EU law, it can react quicker than in the past. These findings, based on document analysis and interviews with officials from the Commission, the European Environmental Agency and the member states, suggest that the digital transformation opens new opportunities for promoting sustainability and strengthens the Commission within the EU system. However, the Commission’s monitoring capacity have improved only recently, and quicker access to better data is only one of several factors influencing its monitoring capacity. Key Words: Environmental Policy, European Union, Executives, Governance, Green Politics, Policy Implementation, Public Administration