GRaBS Adaptation Action
Planning Toolkit
Appendix 3: Correspondence between the NUTS levels and the national administrative units (2007)
Nomenclature of territorial units for statistics or NUTS are the official Statistical Regions of Europe and provide GRaBS with a stanard geographical unit for the development of the Assessment Tool.
At the local level, two levels of Local Administrative Units (LAU) have been defined. The upper LAU level (LAU level 1, formerly NUTS level 4) is defined for most, but not all of the countries in the EU. The second LAU level (formerly NUTS level 5) consists of about 120,000 municipalities or equivalent units in the 27 EU Member States.
The NUTS is a three-level hierarchical classification (further details). Since this is a hierarchical classification, the NUTS subdivides each Member State into a whole number of NUTS 1 regions, each of which is in turn is subdivided into a whole number of NUTS 2 regions and so on. At the regional level (without taking the municipalities into account), the administrative structure of the Member States generally comprises two main regional levels. The NUTS Regulation lays down the following minimum and maximum thresholds for the average size of the NUTS regions:
- NUTS 1 - 3 - 7 million
- NUTS 2 - 800,000 - 3 million
- NUTS 3 - 150,000 - 800,000
Here are the details for the NUTS/LAU in each of the GRaBS partner countries. The table includes the local names for each level and the nmbers correspond to the number of administrative areas at the level.
NUTS 1 |
NUTS 2 |
NUTS 3 |
LAU 1 |
LAU 2 |
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| Greece | |||||||||
| Groups of development regions | 4 | Periferies | 13 | Nomoi | 51 | Dimoi/Koinotites | 1,034 | Demotiko diamerisma / Koinotiko diamerisma | 6,130 |
| Italy | |||||||||
| Gruppi di regioni | 5 | Regioni | 21 | Provincie | 107 | - | Comuni | 8,101 | |
| Lithuania | |||||||||
| - | 1 | - | 1 | Apskritys | 10 | Savivaldybės | 60 | Seniūnijos | 518 |
| The Netherlands | |||||||||
| Landsdelen | 4 | Provincies | 12 | COROP regio's | 40 | - | Gemeenten | 443 | |
| Austria | |||||||||
| Gruppen von Bundesländern | 3 | Bundesländer | 9 | Gruppen von Politischen Bezirken | 35 | - | Gemeinden | 2,357 | |
| Slovakia | |||||||||
| - | 1 | Oblasti | 4 | Kraje | 8 | Okresy | 79 | Obce | 2,928 |
| Sweden | |||||||||
| Landsdelar | 3 | Riksområden | 8 | Län | 21 | - | Kommuner | 290 | |
| United Kingdom | |||||||||
| Government Office Regions; Country | 12 | Counties (some grouped); Inner and Outer London; Groups of unitary authorities | 37 | Upper tier authorities or groups of lower tier authorities (unitary authorities or districts) | 133 | Lower tier authorities (districts) or individual unitary authorities; Individual unitary authorities or LECs (or parts thereof); Districts | 443 | Wards (or parts thereof) | 10,664 |