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13 - Science into policy: The European Environment Agency

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 October 2011

By
Sven Dammann  and
David Gee
Edited by
Justus Lentsch  and
Peter Weingart
Sven Dammann
Affiliation:
European Commission, Directorate General for Energy
David Gee
Affiliation:
European Environment Agency
Justus Lentsch
Affiliation:
Heinrich Böll Foundation
Peter Weingart
Affiliation:
Universität Bielefeld, Germany
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Summary

Providing environmental information and framing the discourse – the EEA's tasks and institutional settings

The European Environment Agency (EEA) is a specialised agency of the European Union (EU), dedicated to supporting sustainable development and to helping achieve significant and measurable improvements in Europe's environment, through the provision of timely, targeted, relevant and reliable information on the environment (EEA 2004). Main clients of the Agency's indicator- and case study-based assessments are the European Commission, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union – especially through the EU-presidencies – and the thirty-two member states of the EEA (membership of the EEA is also open to countries that are not among the twenty-seven member states of the EU). Its seat is in the Danish capital Copenhagen.

The EEA currently has an annual budget of circa €40 million and approximately 180 staff members.

The EEA has been operational since 1994. Its founding regulation's Article 1 (EEC 1990) defines its role as follows:

To achieve the aims of environmental protection and improvement laid down by the Treaty and by successive Community action programmes on the environment, the objective [of the EEA] shall be to provide the Community and the Member States with:

  1. objective, reliable and comparable information at European level enabling them to take the requisite measures to protect the environment, to assess the results of such measures and to ensure that the public is properly informed about the state of the environment,

  2. to that end, the necessary technical and scientific support …

Type
Chapter
Information
The Politics of Scientific Advice
Institutional Design for Quality Assurance
 , pp. 238 - 258
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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