22 Environmental Groups from 18 Europe countries give their governments a negative rating on Water Management, according to a survey conducted by the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) and WWF, the conservation organisation, on the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), Europe's central water law since 2000. The survey, from November 2004, covered key elements in achieving "good status" for all waters by 2015. These included the national transposition of EU legal requirements, public participation, and assessment of the environmental condition and economics of water usage.
The four key findings are:
- Environmental groups have high expectations regarding what can be delivered by the WFD in terms of environmental improvements.
- Quality of WFD transposition and implementation is low, giving a poor basis for achieving its "good status" objective. However, there have been some improvements in the quality of public participation in WFD implementation in practice during the year 2004.
- Environmental groups have insufficient capacity to fully participate in WFD implementation.
- Governments and authorities are reluctant to seek environmental NGO participation in "technical" work or to communicate this work in a transparent way.
"Only 3 countries - Ireland , Finland and Romania - seem to have established water authorities with sufficient competences to deal with all water problems at the river basin level as required by EU law. Only 8 countries include the overall WFD objective of achieving "good water status" by 2015 in their national laws ," says Stefan Scheuer, EU Policy Director at the EEB. "The vast majority of countries fail to establish proper legal and administrative provisions to improve water management as required by EU law. This is bad news for the environment, for the credibility of Europe and for the use of tax payers' money. These countries risk conviction in Courts and will have wasted valuable time in terms of fulfilling the law's 2015 goal."
Countries have major problems assessing and communicating the state of their aquatic environment and the economy of water uses. In only one country - Estonia - was the government able to provide figures on the environmental and resource costs of water use as required by European law. " We wonder how cost-effective water management decisions are taken in the other countries without such information." says Stefan Scheuer.
On the basis of the survey's findings, recommendations for environmental groups, the European Commission and national governments have been developed to overcome the serious shortcomings identified. These include the following suggestions:
- Environmental groups should launch complaints at national courts and Commission level about bad legal practice in WFD implementation;
- The European Commission should thoroughly check the quality of national laws, especially respective administrative arrangements and environmental objectives, and start infringement procedures without delay; and
- Member States should dramatically increase investments in efficient and sustainable water management, train "water managers" to deal with non-scientific aspects of their work and continue and build on good examples of public participation.
