4 ISSUES AND INDICATORS IN AN SoE REPORT ON THE INTERNET

This chapter examines and compares the coverage of environmental issues and indicators in national SoE reports on the Internet in CEE countries. It also covers the latest global and European reports - GEO-2 (UNEP 1999) and Dobris+3 (EEA 1998b). In addition, the chapter refers to indicators from earlier printed versions of SoE reports in CEE, presented in the "Environmental Reporting in Central and Eastern Europe" (UNEP/CEU 1997), and "OECD Core Set of Environmental Indicators" (OECD 1993). Croatia and Yugoslavia have not been included in this research because they do not have SoE reports on the Internet. 

As already mentioned, an SoE report usually consists of chapters dedicated to particular issues or problems. In this research, 7 issues and 8 problems have been presented; they are listed in Table 3 below. The table shows that the chosen issues represent known parts of the environment, such as atmosphere, water, or nature. This approach is similar to the GEO-1 and GEO-2 (UNEP 1997, 1999), although the Socio-Economic Developments issue has been taken from the Dobris+3 (EEA 1998b). This way of presentation has been chosen because it seems more simple and user-friendly, which has to be taken into account when presenting the information to a wide audience. Otherwise, using the environmental problems, such as eutrophication, ozone depletion, or acidification as main chapter titles in a report would confuse the public.

All 7 issues presented here are contained in the majority of CEE reports on the Internet, as well as in the Dobris+3, GEO-2, and OECD 1993 Set of indicators. This is shown in Table 4. Some exceptions are Marine and Coastal Environment, as well as Socio-Economic Developments, which are not covered in many reports, or are covered under some other issue or problem. For example, the Marine and Coastal Environment issue is sometimes described in the Water issue or Eutrophication problem. 

Socio-Economic Developments	Atmosphere	Land	Marine & Coastal Environment
Dobris+3 OECD GEO-2	Dobris+3 OECD GEO-2	Dobris+3 OECD GEO-2	Dobris+3 GEO-2

Nature	Water	Urban Environment
Dobris+3 OECD GEO-2	Dobris+3 OECD GEO-2	Dobris+3 OECD GEO-2

The next 7 sections of this chapter discuss the presentation of all issues and problems in SoE reports; each problem is discussed in a separate subsection. Indicators included were chosen according to frequency of their presence in SoE reports. In addition, each problem has been represented by a table that shows the coverage of chosen indicators in national SoE reports on the Internet. The PSR framework has been used to classify the indicators, as proposed by the OECD (1993). Some interesting ways of presentation are shown graphically.