Overview of Current Systems
Fire statistics – Collection, processing and harmonization

The production of reliable statistics depends on fundamental methodological choices that affect their accuracy, representativeness, and comparability. Three key aspects deserve attention: the data collection method (census or sampling), data completeness, and the adjustment techniques used to account for biases and omissions.

The first distinction concerns the contrast between a comprehensive approach and a census-based approach. In the former, all events are recorded, as in mandatory reporting systems. This strategy, adopted by the United Kingdom with its Incident Recording System, ensures near-complete coverage, subject to the quality of the data entries. The census-based approach, on the...