Primary objectives of our work were to spatially delineate post industrial areas of the EU-27 and indicate key environmental, social and economic sensitivity issues for these regions. The density of industrial sites within NUTS-x regions for EU-27 countries was assessed by using CORINE 2000 land cover layer. A development of postindustrial society in Europe represents a strong geographic diversity. There are distinct historical and current differences between regions which form major groups, comprising similar internal characteristics and definable trends in environmental and socioeconomic sense. Regions grouped into postindustrial clusters are fundamentally different from the European average, and are facing specific problems related to global market and political changes. Eastern postindustrial regions can be characterized as socially and economically weak, exhibiting high unemployment rate, low GDP, negative population growth and a strong environmental pressure, represented by a high density of dump sites. Most of the western EU postindustrial areas have been successfully recovered and moved into new economy as shown by most of the indicators. In urban postindustrial zones, however, emission sources of pollutants seem to continually be a major problem--not necessarily in terms of exceeding thresholds, but through a remarkable difference in the amount of pollutants produced relative to other regions.

Cross-cutting environmental, social and economic changes may have harsh impacts on sensitive regions. To address sustainability issues by governmental policy measures properly, the geographical delineation of sensitive 472 Oliver Dilly et al.regions is essential. With reference to the European impact assessment guidelines from 2005, sensitive regions were identified by using environmental, social and economic data and by applying cluster analysis, United Nation Environmental Policy priorities and expert knowledge. On a regionalised 'Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics' (NUTS) level and for pre-defined sensitive region types (post-industrial zones, mountains, coasts and islands) 31 % of the European area was identified as sensitive. However, the delineation mainly referred to social and economic issues since the regional data bases on environmental indicators are limited and do not allow the separation of medium-term vital classes of sensitive regions. Overall, the sensitive regions showed indicator values differing from the EU-25 average.