EU Water Law

As a framework legal act, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) quite unsurprisingly attempted to restructure a large part of the existing EU water legislation. The WFD does, as suggested by its title, establish a framework for a water “policy”. This is obvious in so far as it comes up with new concepts, at least at EU level, for dealing with water protection, such as that according to which the most relevant hydrological level for dealing with the water resource is that of the river basin, or at least of a coherent group of river basins. Likewise, the WFD makes an overreaching effort in making use of other relevant EU legislation, be it in the field of the environment or in other environmental protection, such as the Natura 2000 network.

Another sign of the EU legislature’s efforts to organise a water policy can be found in the fact that the WFD provides strict rules in terms of the appraisal of the hydrological, biological and quantitative status of all kinds of water bodies existing on Member States territories and organises both initial analyses of those bodies of water as well as further monitoring. More actively related to the conduct of a policy are the provisions of the WFD which require Member States to adopt and implement river basin management plans, programmes of measures and to control point and diffuse sources of pollutants by a “combined approach.”

One more major innovation, again at least at the EU level, is that of using the pricing of water as an economic instrument of protection of that important resource, providing enticement to the various users to behave in a wise fashion. Last but not least, the WFD lays down a series of objectives, the ultimate one of which is to reach a “good” status of all water bodies within the EU territory, a goal that was in principle required to be reached by 2015, albeit not without certain flexibilities. To this end, the WFD merged into its provisions the rules which had been set forth by prior Directives with respect to water quality and discharges into groundwater and surface waters.

In spite of the obvious very large ambition of the WFD, as can be gathered from the above snapshot of its contents, it has not substituted all prior existing water legislation, by far.