Water Management
The maintenance of sufficient clean and available water is critical for the future sustainable development of Europe's population and industry. However, Europe's water resources have been under a range of threats for many decades. These threats have included pollution from domestic waste water discharges, emissions from industry and over-extraction of limited surface and ground waters.
Initially the European Community responded by adopting measures to tackle specific problems, such as individual dangerous substances to the protection of bathing waters. However, individual countries and regional agreements (such as for the Rhine) promoted a more integrated river basin approach to water management. This bore fruit in the EU with the adoption of the 2000 water framework Directive. This aims to protect surface fresh waters, ground waters and coastal waters based on ecological objectives. It achieves this through integrated river basin management whereby all relevant pressures on ecological quality are identified and programmes of measures developed to address these.
IEEP has a long history of work on water management issues for a range of bodies including the European Commission and UK government agencies. This has included work on specific issues such as drinking water, urban waste water treatment and dangerous substances as well as overviews of initiatives such as the Rhine Commission. Most work is now focused on the implementation of the framework Directive, examining the nature of the opportunities and limitations of the Directive.
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