Evidence-based climate change policies require a wealth of information.
The policies currently being developed need to address a variety of issues including:
- allocating emissions rights to nations in an economically optimal and efficient manner,
- controlling the negative impacts on economic growth and employment,
- providing the information needed by citizens and businesses to change consumption patterns and
- minimizing the societal disruptions due to changes in the structural composition of economies.
In addition, there is the need to be able to identify and measure the change towards a new societal framework which is moving in the direction of an improved and potentially greener consumption and production patterns.
The challenge for the statistical organisations is to identify the existing and new information components that meet these policy needs; to incorporate them to the statistical datasets; and to make them available to the society.
The informational needs are extensive and crosscutting – and this is where the statistical system is already making a large contribution which has the potential to increase further with the rich set of information that it produces in different relevant domains.
This section includes a link to the current pocketbook on Energy, Transport and Environment that provides an overview of information that the European Statistical System provides on these areas, many of it important for climate change measurement. Links to other relevant sites are also included.
The Eurostat publication "Using official statistics to calculate greenhouse gas emissions - A statistical guide " provides users with a collection of data available in the European Statistical System with the potential to be used for such calculations.
