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Land degradation is recognised as a threat to the European and global ecosystems and their condition, with direct relevance to climate change adaptation, human well-being, food-securityand social welfare. However, objectives to halt and revert land degradation are dispersed over a range of strategic documents and policy guidelines at the EU. So are the topics of land and soil, which can be found across policy instruments of various sectors.Therefore, there is a need for a single up-to-date strategic policy framework that preserves and enhances land resources in the European Union. This report aims at providing an overview of the current knowledge regarding land degradation from different perspectives: by describing the current policy context, in particular key policy programs at the European and international level with ambitions to remediate land degradation, by specifying current approaches towards land degradation mapping, with specific emphasis on mapping impacts on ecosystem services, by analysing the evolution of land degradation assessments over time, their knowledge gain and weaknesses, by showing the importance of soil degradation mapping as central factor for land degradation mapping, by depicting the potentials of remote sensing approaches for land degradation mapping, by explaining the concept of Land Degradation Neutrality, as developed by UNCCD, and by proposing the way forward through establishing an Integrated Land Systems Data Platform to support the mapping of land degradation impacts on ecosystem services.

Today, 52 % of the global population lives in cities, another 33 % in towns and suburbs, a trend that is going to continue. On a European level, around 72 % of the population is already living in cities and towns, also with the expectation to increase. In this context, the main challenge ahead is to find a way to accommodate a greater number of people while at the same time reducing impacts upon and from the environment and improving the quality of life of cities’ residents. This report makes an attempt to characterise 385 European cities with respect to their main environmental and socio-economic conditions. To this end, we identified and selected 41 parameters from different thematic domains (urban dimension and land use, urban form and distribution, climate, socio-economics, waste, water, air quality, transport and mobility, as well as governance) and calculated clusters of cities based on those parameters. The resulting typology should help to analyse the characteristics of cities in similar situations (i.e. cities from the same group or cluster) because there are simply too many cities in Europe. The report is intended as ‘food for thought’ and information source for policy- and decision-makers at national, sub-national and municipal levels, and for researchers and interested citizens alike and is divided into four chapters. While chapter 1 provides the context and scope of the report, chapter 2 highlights the key factors of urban sustainability and their interdependences. Chapter 3, the core of the report, presents the city typology (including a short description of the approach) and analyses the resulting clusters and their characteristics. This analysis provides a broad view on cities, their situation and basic functions, their individual performance and main activities, their threats and their most important changes. Finally, chapter 4 provides conclusions and a short discussion

his report is the outcome of a study that was executed during the past five years by the EEA and ETC/ULS with support from EIONET (NRCs land use and spatial planning) and the European Soil Data Centre of DG JRC. The analysis represents the first attempt to assess land use efficiency at a European scale. Several new data sets relating specifically to soil functions, were published only recently, and this made assessment possible. A key aim of this work was to study land cover changes and their positive or negative impacts on soil functions, and to obtain a disaggregated hotspot analysis and an overall balance of those impacts on soil functions. The report follows a logical flow. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the context of the study. It lays out a framework by giving information on the status of land and soil in the context of land resource efficiency, listing the most relevant current global and European policies, and introducing the concepts of soil function and land multi-functionality. Chapter 2 provides details of the study’s input data, in particular the land cover flows as well as the pan-European soil function data, further explains the concept of multi-functionality and introduces the impact evaluation matrix. The combined presentation of land processes and soil functions is the major topic in Chapter 3, whereas Chapter 4 then focuses on the impacts of a number of selected, sector-related land processes on several of the soil functions. The latter also identifies a number of hotspot regions at the NUTS 3 level in which the potential of soils to provide certain functions might be substantially affected. At the end of the report, Chapter 5 provides information on the balance of impacts, by looking at the predominantly positive and predominantly negative impacts to assess the overall situation in Europe, but also at national and regional level. Finally, Chapter 6 identifies the implications of the analysis for land governance and attempts to shed light on the status of land resource efficiency in Europe.

This report is the result of more than four years of joint work between the EEA, ETC/ULS, and the EIONET expert group on tourism and environment as a contribution to explore the feasability of monitoring environmental impacts of the sector and its sustainability trends. The first part of the report (‘Tourism in multiple contexts‘) draws an overview of tourism as a complex socio-economic sector, that has many policy and social interlinks. The second part (‘Key tourism trends in Europe’) is mainly based on the use of indicators -which were developed during the same period- that show the tourism-environment interplay. The indicators also address the driver–pressure–state–impact–response (DPSIR) analytical framework. Indicator-related assessments in the report are also complemented, for specific aspects, by information provided by a scientific literature review, as well as with national case studies from different European countries. The third part of the report (‘Towards an integrated European information system on tourism’) argues the need for developing the environmental dimension under an integrated tourism reporting mechanism for Europe.