1. INTRODUCTION

CORINE (COoRdination d’INformation Environnementale) was a work programme set up by the European Council of Ministers on 27 June 1985 (Decision 85/338/EEC). It aimed at gathering, co-ordinating and ensuring the consistency of information about the state of the environment and natural resources in the European Community. One of its components was CORINAIR - the CORINe AIR emissions inventory.

This was compiled for the EC for 1985. Following the decision to establish the European Environment Agency (Regulation 1210/90 on 7 May 1990), but before the agency was established, CORINAIR was continued for 1990 and became CORINAIR 90.

A methodology was agreed across Europe. The aims were to produce a complete, consistent and transparent inventory within a reasonable time-scale to serve the needs of the user community.

CORINAIR 90 has produced an emission inventory for eight pollutants covering 28 European countries (on 22 March 1995) with a further three countries collaborating but which have not yet supplied any data. (Countries collaborating in CORINAIR 90 are shown in Table 1.) While the data has been collected, results have still not been reported yet. There are a wide range of potential users outside the CORINAIR 90 expert group including policy makers and researchers (see Table 2). The lateness of the final results is damaging its usefulness to these users.

The EEA has four main goals:

1. to produce objective, reliable and comparable information for both those concerned with European Policy and the European public,
2. to support the Commission, the Council and the European Parliament in preparing and evaluating environmental measures,
3. to co-ordinate the EIONET and publish a European state of the environment report every three years,
4. to liaise with relevant national, regional and global environmental programmes and institutes.

The emission inventory work will help meet all these goals. The collection of data and its transformation into useful information is fundamental to an emission inventory. The European approach to producing inventories for the continent has been a collaborative one with both institutes in each country and regional organisations involved. This collaboration will continue.

The European Environment Agency (EEA) now intends to compile an inventory for the year 1994. This is Air Emissions ‘94 (AE 94). It has established an Air Emissions Topic Centre whose first task is to review the success of CORINAIR 90 and recommend the methods and procedures necessary for Air Emissions '94 to be successful.

With the creation of EEA the voluntary collaboration which produced CORINAIR 90 has been superseded by a more formal system with National Focal Points (NFPs) in each country to co-ordinate the contribution of data to the Topic Centre. This should enable more regular and timely production of data and help to give the emissions inventories a higher profile.

Table 1 Countries Collaborating in CORINAIR 90

The work of the topic centre is determined by the EEA’s multiannual work programme. This work programme has ten main areas. The inventory activities are performed under part 5 - Source Oriented Monitoring, Assessment of Pressures. This part of the programme group - Monitoring and Databases. The specific projects that the this topic centre is working on are SA1 - Air Emission - General Approach and Assessment and SA2 Air Emissions Inventories ‘90 and ‘94.

Emissions to land and water, integrated emission inventories and waste generation are not part of these projects and so are not considered in depth in this report. However there are links between these activities and its will be important that there is good communication between the projects.

Table 2 Potential Users of CORINAIR 90 Results