4.8 Conclusion

This Chapter presented the 7 major environmental issues often present in SoE reports. It showed the results of the comparison of the 13 CEE SoE reports on the Internet. The second European SoE report - Dobris+3 (EEA 1998b) and the global - GEO-2 (UNEP 1999) have also been included in the comparison. In addition, the OECD Core set of indicators has been covered too (OECD 1993).

Generally, it showed that all 7 chosen issues are covered in the SoE reports. However, the degree of coverage varies from 100% of the Urban Environment issue to 31.25% of the Marine and Coastal Environment, the latter not being present at all in the OECD Set (OECD 1993) and the majority of the CEE reports. Further, this chapter stressed that a limited number of common indicators for all the issues can be found and used in electronic reports.

Finally, one of the problems addressed in this chapter was graphical presentation of the indicators in compared reports. The general conclusion is that the reports do not contain enough good graphs; graphs that are present are usually unclear or too complicated. However, bearing in mind that the Internet is very suitable for graphical presentation of information, its advantages should be used wisely. Therefore, carefully designed graphs accompanied with a small amount of text will be very effective in presenting the information they are supposed to communicate to the audience. They should show the information in the quickest possible way, and should not leave space for calculation, assumption, or wrong interpretation. Unfortunately, the scope of this thesis does not allow more than to conclude that the problem of graphical presentation of data in SoE reports on the Internet requires improvement.