EEA activities

Air pollutant emissions

The EEA supports the EU in developing long-term strategies to reduce emissions of air pollutants by providing assessment and information to policy-makers. Our key activities and products include:

• making available data reported by European countries as part of their reporting obligations under international and European legislation;
• annual reports providing information on the most recent data submitted by EU Member States under the EU National Emission Ceilings Directive. The data are made available via the EEA air pollutant emissions data viewer (NEC Directive);
• compilation of the European Union's annual Long-range Transboundary Air Pollution Convention emission inventory and supporting Inventory Report. The data are made available via the EEA air pollutant emissions data viewer (LRTAP Convention);
• an emission inventory review process, jointly with the UNECE/EMEP Centre on Emission Inventories and Projections, which assesses the quality of national air pollutant emission inventories;
• regular updates of the EMEP/EEA Air Pollutant Emission Inventory Guidebook, which provides methodological guidance for national inventory compilers and researchers who are interested in calculating air pollutant emissions; 

Air quality

The EEA's work on air quality has supported the development and implementation of the Directives on Air Quality (Directive on Ambient Air Quality and Cleaner Air for Europe and Directive on heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in ambient air).

 Key activities and products include:

• AirBase, which holds air quality monitoring data and supporting information from Europe’s air quality networks and individual stations measuring ambient air pollution;
• Up-to-date air quality maps, which provide access to up-to-date concentrations of ozone, nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter (PM₁₀) and sulphur dioxide across Europe.

Assessments and reports

Each year, the EEA publishes a number of technical and assessment reports on air pollution, including the Air Quality in Europe report series. These reports include contributions to the EEA’s regular state of the environment reports, such as the Air Pollution chapter of EEA's 'The European environment — state and outlook 2020' report. 

EEA publishes and updates indicators on emission trends and air quality as part of the EEA's air pollution indicators.

EEA's activities in the area of air pollution are performed in close cooperation with the European Topic Centre on Air Pollution and Climate Change Mitigation (ETC/ACM) and with EEA's country network (Eionet).