Coordination of Information on the Environment (CORINE)

CORINE (Coordination of Information on the Environment) is a European program initiated in 1985 by the European Commission to provide decision makers with both an overview of existing knowledge and information about Europe's environment that is as complete and up-to-date as possible on certain features of the biosphere.

To this end, the three aims of the CORINE program are as follows:

• To compile information on the state of the environment in the European Union with regard to certain topics (e.g., air quality, biodiversity, water quality, natural resources) that have priority for all the member states of the European Community
• To coordinate the compilation of data and the organization of information within the member states or at the international level
• To ensure that information is consistent and that data are comparable

The program started as a 5-year experimental program within the European Commission for gathering, coordinating, and ensuring the consistency of information on the state of the environment and natural resources in Europe. In 1990, a regulation was adopted that establishes the European Environment Agency (EEA), which is today responsible for, among other tasks, continuing the work of the CORINE program. EEA is providing the European Community and the member states with the objective information necessary for framing and implementing sound and effective environmental policies in Europe. To that end in particular, EEA is now providing the European Commission with the information that it needs to be able to successfully carry out its tasks of identifying, preparing, and evaluating measures and legislation in the field of the environment.

Today, the CORINE data sets are only a small portion of the large amount of data sets, maps, and graphs on Europe's environment that are made freely available for electronic download through the EEA data dissemination service. The three main CORINE databases that are made available through this EEA data service are as follows:

• CORINE land cover, which provides a seamless land cover map of Europe at scale 1:100.000 with 44 classes, including land cover changes
• CORINE biotopes, which provides an inventory of 6,000 sites of community importance for nature conservation in Europe
• CORINE air, an inventory of emissions of air pollutants in Europe