European Commission has published its report about INSPIRE status

The European Commission has finally published its report to the Council and the European Parliament on the implementation of Directive 2007/2/EC of March 2007 establishing an Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community (INSPIRE) .

Together with this report, it presented a detailed evaluation which was carried out in the context of its Regulatory Fitness (REFIT) programme, one of the priorities of the Commission under its Better Regulation agenda.

This evaluation has demonstrated that the INSPIRE Directive is still largely fit-for-purpose, but that further efforts are needed at EU and Member State level to close the significant implementation gaps and to harvest the benefits of the Directive.

As a consequence, the Commission issues a number of recommendations and actions which it will now implement in close collaboration with the Member States. One important follow up is the preliminary agreement on a Maintenance and Implementation Work Programme 2016-2020 at the last meeting of the policy sub-group on Maintenance and Implementation .

The INSPIRE Conference 2016 will be an important platform to discuss the Commission's report and REFIT evaluation and to gather feedback and input on what actions now need to be taken so that we can all harvest the benefits from this important Directive.