Background Data on land cover is necessary for the preparation of environmental and regional development policies. From 1985 to 1990 the European Commission instituted the CORINE Programme (Co-ordination of Information on the Environment). The aim of the European Union’s CORINE Land Cover project is to provide up to date information on land cover at scale 1:100.000 for the whole Europe. In 1991 it was decided to extend three main CORINE inventories (Biotopes, Corinair and Land Cover) to Central and Eastern European countries. Before the project was launched, the CORINE programme had not been extended to Croatia, and there was a real need to provide users with homogenous land cover information according to the CORINE programme methodology for integrated environmental management. Objectives The project aimed to make available a complete and systematic CORINE land cover (CLC) inventory of Croatia for the years 2000, 1990, and 1980. Specifically, the project was to assess and explain land cover changes between the three dates in order to separate land use changes caused by war and natural land use changes caused by other environmental impacts. The project would then integrate the Croatian CLC database with European land cover databases. Additionally, the project was to build capacity at the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Physical Planning for the use of CLC Croatia and establish a national reference site for CLC. Results The project suffered several delays, but was not encouraged to request for a prolongation. The “official” CLC databases (CLC90 – CLC2000 and CLC changes) were provided to the CLC2000 Technical Team and as of the end of the project (February 2005) was shortly to have been made available on the EEA data server. The project’s monitor noted that there was a need to enquire as to how the Croatian CLC team tackled the issues raised by the CLC2000 TT following their evaluation mission report. CLC80 and the other CLC changes databases were not checked by the CLC2000 TT and more information on the quality assurance and quality control needed to be investigated. The assessment of land cover changes and in particular the environmental analysis did not occur. Finally, dissemination was not a key issue in this project and specific web pages were not included either on the partner institutions websites or on the beneficiary’ website. Furthermore, the website of the Croatian Environment Agency (official holder of the CLC products) had no information on CLC.