In November 2009, both the ERFF Main Board and the UK-EOF Management Group agreed that the UK-EOF should broaden the scope of the current programme to include environmental socio-economic observation requirements.
In September 2010, the UK-EOF ran an expert workshop to:
- Bring the natural and socio-economic communities together
- Assess the need for socio-economic observations to fully answer environmental issues and questions and vice versa (to assess what environmental observations are needed to address socio-economic issues and questions)
- Identify whether there are relevant, available, authorative, socio-economic datasets or activities
- Determine whether metadata for the activities are available and accessible
- Develop options for improving access to both the data and metadata
- Discuss opportunities for cross disciplinary working.
The workshop built upon the work already completed in developing Towards a Statement of Need and was arranged in close conjunction with Economic Social Research Council, the Environment Agency and Defra.
Full details can be found in the report, 'Assessing the Socio-economic Observation Needs within the UK-EOF'. Recommendations fell into three main areas:
- Develop metadata (for the key datasets identified) and add it to the UK-EOF Observation Activity Catalogue
- Facilitate collaboration with Stakeholders
- Build a service to support interdisciplinary working.
Relevant datasets include social and/or economic surveys which have environmental components within them. Many other datasets, which sit outside of the UK-EOF's remit but may provide valuable supporting information, were identified. The links to these can be found in the document, Links to Socio-economic information (outside of the UK-EOF Remit).
Several 'data hubs', hold relevant social and economic information. These searchable resources (listed under external links), provide a good starting point for those looking for social and economic information are also listed in the catalogue.
The other recommendations will be considered by the Management Group in 2011.
