Implementation of the classification of environmental purposes in the EGSS, EPEA and ESST, and breakdown of the ESST by NACE industry.

2026-07-22

As of 2025 the Environmental Subsidies and Similar Transfers (ESST) accounts are to be delivered to Eurostat in the context of EU Regulation 691/2011 on European Environmental Economic Accounts. Belgium has recently started producing the ESST accounts. However, the Belgian ESST accounts do not contain any data by NACE industry. As this allocation to NACE industries has been determined as a crucial element to underpin European Green Deal policies, it has been included as part of the mandatory characteristics in the new ESST module. By looking for ways to allocate environmental subsidies and similar transfers to industries, this project is to close the existing mandatory characteristics gap in the Belgian ESST accounts. Furthermore, as of 2025, the classifications of the environmental domains used in the monetary environmental economic accounts, the Classification of Environmental Protection Activities (CEPA) and the Classification of Resource Management Activities (CReMA), are to be replaced by the unique Classification of Environmental Purposes (CEP). This implies that all the source data of the Environmental Goods and Services Sector (EGSS) accounts, the Environmental Protection Expenditure Accounts (EPEA) and the ESST accounts will need to be adjusted and the calculation programs, into which these source data are fed, will have to be rewritten. This project will enable Belgium to achieve this mandatory makeover and report data to Eurostat in the new format. The introduction of the CEP could form an ideal starting point to increase the usefulness of the monetary environmental economic accounts for EU policy making. This can be obtained if the CEP is applied at its most detailed level. A final objective of this project is to test the feasibility of calculating the EGSS, EPEA and ESST at the 6-digit CEP class level and thus turn the monetary environmental economic accounts into flexible tools that can be used to support a variety of EU environmental policies.

Belgium

2026-01-15