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The Framework Directive
sets the most important reporting requirements (Article 11). The two most
relevant reports are:
- Annual reporting on air quality
in the previous year, based on monitoring, possibly also on modelling. This report, to
be sent to the Commission before 1 October, has been specified in more
detail in Council Decision
2002/839/EC, which describes a detailed questionnaire to be
filled in. A guideline
explains this report further. Each Member State has its own internal system
for collecting the data. Under the ozone directive,
there are during also reporting requirements after each summer month and
each summer on threshold exceedances (See
example report in the web links section below). The role of cities varies
between Member States: in some countries this is in practice entirely done
at the national level, in other countries regions and cities have to
provide air quality monitoring data and possibly modelling results to the
national level, following instructions from the Ministry.
- Reporting of “plans or
programmes” to reduce air pollution. Reduction plans have to be developed within two years
for all locations where the air pollution levels are so high that exceedance is to be expected by the time that the limit
value has to be met (2005 or 2010, depending on the pollutant). The
Commission has developed a summary format for the report to be sent to the
Commission, which describes the exceedance
situation and the reduction plan, and a working group has written a short guidance.
In practice, cities will often have responsibility for developing such
plans. It depends on the country whether cities have to draft the summary
for the Commission themselves (following instructions from the Ministry)
or whether the national level takes care of this.
For both reports the
Commission plans to publish summary reports.
Apart from these reports, the
Member States have to report annually the raw data of air quality measurements
under the “Exchange
of Information Decision”. These are processed by the European Environmental
Agency, stored in the database AirBase, which can be accessed by anyone through the
internet. Usually cities are not involved in this. |