In 2008 the UK-EOF progressed a line of work to determine how much the UK invests in environmental observations. Assimila Ltd was commissioned to develop guidelines to report the costs associated with environmental observations.
The guidelines for assessing the costs of observing our environment, provided in the Final Report, were scaled down. In November 2008 Professor Bob Watson wrote to 18 organisations, who carry out the majority of activities recorded in the database, to ask them to follow the scaled down Guidelines (November 2008) and submit investment data by December 2008. The Investment Study letter explains the aims and requirements for gathering economic information.
A second phase of data collection occurred in May 2009 when the same 18 organisations were asked to report their investments in observations according to revised (May 2009) instructions.
It is this information that was used to generate the 2008/09 investment estimate.
