Globally, the environmental goods and services industry is growing rapidly in response to environmental pressures and the shift towards business and government strategies that are more sustainable over the long term. However, the industry which supplies the goods and services that enable businesses and nations to meet environmental challenges is poorly identified, measured and understood.

This manual, which has been jointly developed by the OECD and Eurostat, aims to provide a firm basis for constructing comparable statistics of the environmental industry. It is based on recent experience in OECD countries in building up a quantitative statistical picture of this crosscutting industry that is not well identified in traditional statistical systems.