Strategic discussions among EEA member countries and the main EU institutions responsible for environmental policy, reporting and assessment have underlined an increasing need for quantitative information on the state of the environment based on timely, quality-assured data, concerning in particular land cover and land use. Based on these requirements EEA is collaborating since 2006 with the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA) on the implementation of a fast track service on land monitoring in line with the communication: “Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES): From Concept to Reality” [1]. CORINE Land Cover 2006 is the third European Land Cover inventory (1990, 2000 and 2006). The number of participating countries is increasing, at present being 39. The project is co-financed by the EEA and the member countries, and covers 5.8 Mkm². Results will be freely available on the Internet. A Technical Team working under the ETC-LUSI (European Topic Centre Land Use and Spatial Information) is responsible for technical follow-up of the project, i.e. training of national teams and verification of results. National teams use multi-temporal SPOT-4/5 and IRS-P6 imagery to derive the minimum 5 ha land cover changes that occurred between 2000 and 2006. Particular emphasis is placed on mapping the real change processes. National teams usually have access to recent topographic maps and high-resolution digital orthophotos as in-situ data. CLC2006 is produced by combining CLC2000 and CLC-Changes in a GIS.