HISTORY
The SPIRS (Seveso Plants Information Retrieval System) database was established in 2001 by the JRC at the request of the European Commission's Directorate General for the Environment (DG ENV) as a voluntary database to which the EU Member States could identify their Seveso establishments to the European Commission. In 2005, following an amendment to the Seveso II legislation (Directive 2003/105/EC), reporting of establishments to the European Commission's SPIRS database became mandatory. This obligation has subsequently been reconfirmed in the Seveso III Directive (2012/18/EU). The JRC manages this reporting system on behalf of DG ENV in fulfillment of the Commission's obligations under the Seveso Directive and is the main point of contact for Member States in this regard.
The former version of SPIRS was a distributed database system aimed to provide access to risk related information from major hazardous industrial establishments in Europe to the European Commission. The last version of the database is SPIRS 2.2 dated 2002 and remained active up to 2012. In this old version, the Countries, making use of a local version of SPIRS, developed a formatted file that had to be submitted to European Commission Joint Research Centre’s Major Accident Hazards Bureau (MAHB) for the update of the overall SPIRS DB. For security purposes, the overall SPIRS DB was operated off-line preventing unwanted intrusions.
Taking stock of currently available advanced Information and Communication (ICT) technologies and in light of the necessary changes required as a result of the entry into force of the new Seveso III Directive (2012/18/EU, 4 July 2012), the European Commission decided to invest in an entirely new reporting system, which has been dubbed "eSPIRS".
eSPIRS has been designed and developed within the MINERVA web platform. MINERVA is MAHB’s portal for scientific and policy support services and tools an ICT architecture of tools aimed to support the European Union's policies related to Chemical Accident Prevention and Preparedness (CAPP) and Disaster risk Reduction.
eSPIRS
In early 2013, MAHB, in consultation with DG ENV, began designing and developing the framework for eSPIRS to encompass information on establishments that are considered to present major hazards due to the potential accident risk associated with the presence of dangerous substances as defined by the Seveso III Directive.
There are now 27 EU Member States, plus two EEA(1) Countries (namely Iceland, Norway), reporting into eSPIRS. Presently there are more than 12,000 establishments reported.
These data are provided to the Commission by the national Seveso Competent Authorities, who own the data and are responsible for its accuracy. The data are made public by the Commission on behalf of the Member States.
Member States are allowed to make certain establishment information confidential, and therefore, not available to the public, for any of the reasons indicated in Directive 2003/4/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 January 2003 on public access to environmental information.
The purpose of the database is to support the Member States and the Commission in their risk management-related decision making processes by giving an insight into the geographical distribution of risk from Seveso establishments.
Minimum information collected in accordance with Article 21(3) of the Seveso III Directive includes the name or trade name of the operator, the full address of the establishment, and the activity of the establishment. Additionally, eSPIRS has been designed based on the COMMISSION IMPLEMENTING DECISION of 10 December 2014 establishing the format for communicating the information referred to in Article 21(3) of Directive 2012/18/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council on the control of major-accident hazards involving dangerous substances.
The information collected provides an overview of the number, spatial distribution and type of major hazard sites. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) allow mapping of spatial components of the establishments and preparation of a variety of thematic maps based on a specific need or request.
The content of eSPIRS is updated by national authorised users, on a country by country basis, based on national internal deadlines. Non-confidential content of eSPIRS DB is available to the public as of the 1st January 2017.
All users are required to obtain authentication from the European Commission Authentication Service (ECAS) in order to access eSPIRS non-confidential data (read-only privileges).
For Seveso Competent Authorities, there is an additional authorisation process to be able to add and edit their establishment data (read and write privileges). Please contact JRC-MINERVA-ICT@ec.europa.eu for more information.
All users can access the public data in eSPIRS. To access the public data, an "external " user must be registered in the EU Login autentication service (otherwise known as ECAS - European Commission Authentication Service website).
ECAS Registration Link
Note that users from all other domains of the European Commission already exist in ECAS and can use their user names and passwords to access.
As of 1 June 2015 the Seveso III Directive ( 2012/18/EU ) has entered into force and the reporting into eSPIRS should be executed according to such Directive and its Implementation Decision ( 2014/895/EU ). eSPIRS non-confidential data [remove "that has been"] reported into eSPIRS after 31 December 2016 by the Competent Authorities has been made publicly available on 1 January 2017.
Please note that this data was received by the Commission from the National Seveso Competent Authorities, who are the owner and responsible of the data. It is disclosed for information only [and cannot be re-used without the agreement of the originator, who holds a copyright on it]. It does not reflect the position of the Commission and cannot be quoted as such.
Users can access the eSPIRS application by clicking the Login link in the upper right hand side of this page.
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(1) Countries of the European Economic Area (EEA) are obliged to adopt all EU legislation related to the single market except laws on agriculture and fisheries. For the purposes of this document the « Member States » are considered to include the 27 EU Member States and Norway and Iceland as EEA countries. Note also that Seveso-like establishment data have also been provided on a voluntary basis from Switzerland even though, as an EFTA (European Free Trade Act) country, Switzerland does not strictly come under the Seveso Directive.
(2) R. Jelinek, M. Wood and M. Christou. 2011. Industrial establishments in Europe distributed in the SPIRS database. European Commission. Joint Research Centre. Luxembourg. JRC 68252.
