Lazy days: southern Europe slow to produce draft river basin plans

The EU's pursuit of "good" water status through the Water Framework Directive is behind schedule, underfunded and unlikely to be achieved by the 2015 target. Alan Osborn reports.

All is not well with the European Union's ambitious Water Framework Directive (WFD). The 27 EU member states were required to establish their first river basin management plans for all 110 river basin districts in the EU by the end of this year, and they were to include specific measures to ensure that all EU waters reached "good" status by 2015.

It will not happen - there is simply not enough time. By the end of 2008, member countries were supposed to have published their draft plans and opened them for consultation for six months. But with less than three months of 2009 left, only 16 countries have published draft plans. Others have partially done so and eight have put out nothing at all. Clearly, the mandatory consultations will have to run well into 2010.

"It's fair to say we have some serious concerns," said a European Commission official closely involved with WFD implementation.

Demanding legislation

This setback is not surprising. The WFD will not only bring in specific new environmental disciplines over water management, it will also significantly widen the purpose and reach of them. It will no longer be enough merely to protect the water environment from pollution and other threats. The requirement in future will be to regard water systems as part of broader ecosystems and manage them (and re-build them where necessary) in the interests of all aspects of natural water sources.

Water sources under this definition include groundwater, rivers, canals, lakes, reservoirs, estuaries, coastal waters, and the water requirements of terrestrial ecosystems that depend on groundwater, such as wetlands.

Southern Europe lagging

At a European water conference in Brussels in April to monitor WFD progress, the Commission told delegates that northern European countries had published on time but southern Europe was lagging. This was worrying "since southern Europe is an area with more visible and multiple water problems and one would expect efforts there to be more intensive to address them". There was a big difference in ambition: some countries had not only developed their strategies but were starting to price them, while others were way behind and their plans bristled with exemptions.

However, the Commission noted that there was universal recognition that the WFD's focus on river basins, rather than on "arbitrary administrative or political limitations," was a key innovation, and particularly important where river basins crossed national borders.

The new system also provides "an overarching framework for facilitating compliance with other water-related legislation, such as the Urban Waste Water Directive, the Nitrates Directive and the Integrated Pollution and Prevention Control Directive," says Stavros Dimas, European environment commissioner.

Funding problems

One problem now nagging at WFD officials is funding. There are indications that many member states, even those most responsive to the WFD, may have underestimated the scale of investment required. Water UK, which represents UK water and wastewater companies, says that "lack of adequate and clear funding sources for all sectors to deliver WFD obligations, in particular for agriculture, government, local government and government agencies, including the Environment Agency, is a major deficit in the current draft plans".

According to John Joyce, associate director of consultancy IPA Energy + Water Economics: "It's becoming more and more likely that more member states will push for phased investment over the next few years." The directive allows for time exemptions, but that "means that most states won't achieve the objectives by 2015", he tells Utility Week.

Momentum building

This is unfortunate, Joyce believes, because the WFD is "a good piece of legislation". He says: "It's building momentum towards looking at the pressure on the water environment and looking at the externalities that exist in trying to manage the water environment.

"Co-operation between member states has improved and our understanding of the water environment has improved, but there's a long way to go."

Alan Osborn is a freelance journalist

UK progress towards implementing the WFD

Set up in 2004, there are ten formal river basins for England and Wales, two for Scotland and three for Northern Ireland. To its credit, the UK is one of the few European Union countries to have published its draft river basin management plans by the deadline of the end of last year.

Although the UK is subject to the same provisions of the WFD as the other 26 EU countries, its geography, and specifically its river systems, differ markedly from others. Rivers in Britain are mostly fast flowing, do not cross any other nation's territory and have been intensively used in the past for industrial and agricultural run-off, making them heavily polluted by EU standards.

A recent report by the Environment Agency makes clear that although water quality in England and Wales improved in 2008 for the nineteenth consecutive year, the overall condition is still worryingly poor. Measured against the quality standards set under the WFD, only 26 per cent of rivers in England and Wales in 2008 would be classified as "good", and therefore acceptable. Only five out of 6,000 meet the highest standards.
The picture is brighter in Scotland, where 60 per cent of water bodies were of good status.

Addressing the European water conference in April, the UK's deputy water director Chris Ryder was not optimistic about the speed of improvement possible. "By 2015 little progress will be made in the UK," he said.

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