Simplification of certain requirements for spatial information infrastructure in the Union (INSPIRE) (Omnibus VIII on environmental legislation)
PURPOSE: to modernise and simplify the INSPIRE Directive by removing technical requirements for data and data sharing and aligning its obligations with more recent horizontal EU data legislation.
PROPOSED ACT: Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council.
ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: the European Parliament decides in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure and on an equal footing with the Council.
BACKGROUND: Directive 2007/2/EC (the INSPIRE Directive) was adopted to create the European Spatial Data Infrastructure that enables the sharing of environmental spatial information among public sector organisations and improves public access to spatial information across Europe.
Completed in 2022, the most recent evaluation confirmed that while the objectives of the Directive remain highly relevant, the legal framework could be simplified and made more effective.
In its Communication of 19 November 2025 entitled “Data Union Strategy - Unlocking Data for AI”, the Commission set out its vision for the data union, including for the improvement of public-sector data-sharing. That agenda requires more than an incremental approach and the Union must take bold action to achieve its goals.
The proposed simplification of the INSPIRE Directive, as part of the environmental simplification omnibus, constitutes the legal component of the GreenData4All initiative, announced in the 2020 European strategy for data, which has the objective to modernise the INSPIRE Directive in line with technological developments and innovation opportunities, with a view to supporting the transition to a greener and carbon-neutral economy, and reducing administrative burden.
CONTENT: this proposal forms part of REFIT, responding to the findings of the 2022 evaluation of the INSPIRE Directive, which identified areas of excessive administrative burden and overly prescriptive technical requirements.
The proposal simplifies the legal framework by deleting obligations that are now addressed through more recent horizontal EU data legislation specifically, Directive (EU) 2019/1024 (Open Data Directive) and Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/138 (High-Value Datasets), Regulation (EU) 2022/868 (Data Governance Act) and Regulation (EU) 2024/903 (Interoperable Europe Act).
The Commission proposed to:
- remove duplicative reporting obligations, reducing compliance workload for Member States;
- remove four empowerments for adoption of implementing rules for interoperability, network services, data sharing and reporting requirements that no longer reflect current best practices or standards, thereby removing rigid technical requirements. The four implementing acts adopted on the basis of the empowerments will be repealed by separate adoption procedure (comitology);
- integrate spatial data access into another existing EU infrastructure, the open data portal (data.europa.eu), thereby simplifying user access and system maintenance and removing the obligation on the Commission to operate a geo-portal.
Modernising the INSPIRE Directive will ensure legal coherence, reduce duplication and the burden on Member States, while preserving the Directive's objectives of ensuring the accessibility, quality and interoperability of environmental spatial data.
The proposed simplification is expected to reduce administrative burdens by 24 - 64% compared to the current baseline. This is considered to represent the realistic range of expected savings from the simplification, particularly those savings linked to the annual update of harmonised datasets and the operation of publication and web services. This translates into annual savings of roughly EUR 6.36 - 16.96 million, based on the average annual cost component for updating and maintaining datasets and services under INSPIRE.