The European Environmental Agency (EEA) wishes to improve its methodological framework in the area of cost-effectiveness assessments and environmental-economic analysis. Ecologic supports the EEA in this task by creating an inventory of applied ex-post evaluation studies with a focus on methodologies, guidelines, legal requirements and good practice examples from the EU Member States.

Ecologic in co-operation with eftec and IVM carries out a review of experiences with cost-effectiveness analyzes, methods and outcomes in the environmental arena. The project's objectives are:

• to present an overview of legal requirements for the ex-post evaluation of environmental policy measures;
• to review existing methodological guidelines and manuals for cost-effectiveness evaluations;
• to take stock of practical experiences with cost-effectiveness analysis;
• to describe methods used against the background of the purpose of the assessments, the availability of adequate data, and the way adaptations have been made in the case of data gaps; and
• to provide recommendations for future methodological work by the EEA in this area.

The results are assembled in an online database on applied ex-post cost-effectiveness analysis (not available anymore). In addition, the final report [pdf, 210 kB] and the executive summary [pdf, 45 kB] are available for download.

The results of this project have been summarized in the publication Assessing the cost-effectiveness of environmental policies in Europe.

Benjamin Görlach presented the results of the project in a lecture on 17 June 2005 in Manchester.