The EU needs better protection of its water, but representatives of Member States don’t seem to understand. Water quality in the EU is protected by different laws, which are not currently respected. To better protect our waters the European Commission proposed to update three of these laws. The EU Parliament proposed some improvements. Now the European Council (Member States) has proposed to severely weaken the text. They want to push back the deadlines to take action by many years. The upcoming debate between the European institutions, the so-called trilogue, will be of pivotal importance. Can the EU secure ambitious measures to effectively protect our waters?
A text that would basically grant EU countries and chemical companies the right to continue polluting European waters for the next decades. That is what the ambassadors of EU Member States agreed on in June 2024. The Council’s text is a huge disillusionment. Not only it fails to address Europe’s pressing water and biodiversity crises, but also undermines some important principles on water protection agreed upon years ago.
After the EU Commission presented a proposal, both Parliament and Council submitted their amendments for the update of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and its daughter directives, the Environment Quality Standards Directive (EQSD) and Groundwater Directive (GWD). The European institutions will now meet in a trilogue this autumn and work on agreeing on a final text.
Amendment of key existing principles
Under the Belgian Presidency, the European Council approved a text (1) that includes proposals (2) pushed by the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Finland and Luxembourg to amend some key provisions of the WFD by introducing two new exemptions to the original environmental objectives. These allow short-term negative impacts and also the deterioration of the quality of a water body by relocating water or sediment.
This ‘uncalled-for action’ severely undermines water protection across the EU. It could impact the achievement of key environmental goals and ultimately public health. Moreover, the Council’s proposal is in contradiction to the findings of the Commission’s 2019 “fitness check” (3), which concluded that the WFD is in fact ‘fit for purpose’ and highlighted several shortcomings in its implementation by Member States that need to be improved. The purpose of the revision is to improve the legal text, for the Directive to meet its objectives, not to worsen it.
The ongoing update of the European water pollution standards must result in an improvement of the current chemical status of our waters. It must not be taken as an opportunity to weaken, or even worse, delete basic principles of the WFD.
Severe delays in compliance
Member States have also agreed to push back the legal deadline for reaching compliance with the proposed newly agreed pollution standards to 2039, with possibilities of further delay until 2051. (4) The proposed delays are in addition to the already existing exemptions of Article 4(4) of the WFD. This article allows for an extension of the deadline in case a Member State determines that all necessary improvements cannot reasonably be achieved within the agreed timeline for reasons of a) technical feasibility, b) disproportionate costs and, c) natural conditions. (5) Worryingly, there is no time limit, so these exemptions can apply indefinitely.
The new standards that are to be delayed include limits for glyphosate, a group of PFAS (‘Forever Chemicals’) and pharmaceuticals. These were not included or monitored before. So do the EU Member States really propose to delay action to limit PFAS residues in our water?
Maybe equally alarming, the European Council’s text also proposes to postpone the compliance date for specific already existing priority substances to 2033, while under the current framework, good status has to be reached by 2027. These substances include Cypermethrin, which is highly toxic to aquatic life, a candidate for substitution and one of our ‘Toxic 12’ pesticides, the carcinogenic and groundwater pollutant Diuron, and the very toxic substance, Dicofol, that is closely related to DDT. (6)
The Council not only demonstrates a clear disregard for concerns regarding aquatic life and citizens’ health but also for the concerns raised by EU citizens. The recent Eurobarometer survey on the Attitudes of Europeans towards the Environment shows that 78% of Europeans want the EU to do more to tackle water pollution. (7) If the current proposals are included in the final text, the effects will be disastrous for the quality of European surface water bodies.
Deletion of key provisions on effects of chemical mixtures
The Council’s text weakens several of the already few provisions in the Commission’s proposal addressing the effects of chemical mixtures. It is worth noting that the Commission’s proposal includes a group threshold for 24 PFAS (expressed as PFOA-equivalents using a relative potency factor approach) in surface and groundwater, as well as a 0.5 µg/L threshold for ‘total pesticides’ in surface water and a 0.25 µg/L threshold ‘total pharmaceuticals’ in groundwater. (8)
In this regard, the Council’s compromise text removes the proposed ‘Sum of pharmaceuticals’ threshold for groundwater (0.25 µg/L) and replaces it with a generic ‘individual pharmaceuticals’ value (2.5 µg/L) in Part D Annex II GWD. The compromise text also deletes the proposed threshold for ‘total pesticides’ of 0.5 µg/L for surface water. It becomes evident, once again, that pesticide pollution in water is a challenge that the member states would rather ignore than address. (9)
Groundwater protection, lowering ambitions
Finally, the compromise text illustrates that Member States are also not eager to strengthen the protection of European groundwater resources – a vital source of drinking water. The text in question serves to weaken the protection of groundwater resources by:
- Limiting the number of PFAS regulated in groundwater and weakening the threshold by aligning it with the provisions of the Drinking Water Directive – less protective than the recent proposal. Instead, the Council introduces a separate threshold for the four PFAS from the EFSA recommendations on maximum intake of PFAS via food and drink (10);
- Delaying the monitoring of pesticide non-relevant metabolites in groundwater by deferring the responsibility of identifying pesticide metabolites to the Commission, which under such a text would have the responsibility to produce, yet again, another list of substances, this time on pesticide metabolites, relevant or not. While it would be welcome to harmonise the legislation on pesticide metabolites, creating another list again relies on the substance-by-substance approach which ignores mixture effects and risks of becoming outdated too quickly to fully address pesticide pollution. (11)
Furthermore, the Council’s text fails to address the relevant recommendation made by the European Parliament to revise the existing EU-wide groundwater thresholds for pesticides and nitrates, which have not been revised since the Directive was set up in 2006 and do not reflect the development of more potent pesticides, nor the state of the science. (12)
What’s next?
Now that the European Council countries have agreed on their position, the negotiations between the EU institutions (the Council, the European Parliament and the European Commission) will begin once the new Parliament is in place, not before autumn 2024. This process, once finalised, will lead to an agreement on the final version of the legal text. The trilogue will be a crucial stage in ensuring that any weakening amendments proposed by the Council’s text do not make it through to the final version of the document amending the WFD, EQSD and GWD.
The support and actions of NGOs at the European and National levels will be essential to ensure that the protection of European waters is treated as urgently as it should be. The urgency was highlighted by two recent PAN Europe reports, revealing alarming levels of the little-known and largely unregulated ‘forever chemical’ TFA (Trifluoroacetic acid) in surface and groundwater samples (13) and also in our drinking water (14).
Read more: Water pollution section on the PAN Europe website
Notes:
(1) European Council’s Amendments to the Proposal Updating WFD, EQSD and GWD, 19th June 2024
(2) Non-paper on non-deterioration WFD, 22 February 2024
(3) Fitness Check of the Water Framework Directive and the Floods Directive
(4) European Council’s Amendments, Article 3, para 1a (iv), (v), new EQSD for surface water and Article 1a and 1b, new, GWD for groundwater
(5) European Council’s Amendments, Article 3, para 1a subparagraph (v)
(6) European Council’s Amendments, Article 3, a) (iii) of the EQSD
(7) EU Barometer: Attitudes of Europeans towards the environment
(8) European Commission, Proposal for a Directive amending the Water Framework Directive, the Groundwater Directive and the Environmental Quality Standards Directive, October 2022
(9) European Council’s Amendments, EQSD, Annex V, row 70
(10) European Council’s Amendments, GWD Annex III rows 3, 3.1 and 3.2.
(11) European Council’s Amendments, GWD, Annex III, row 7, footnote 4
(12) European Parliament, Report on Proposal updating WFD, EQSD, GWD, Amendment 145
(13) PAN Europe & Partners Report, TFA in Water Dirty PFAS Legacy Under the Radar, July 2024
(14) PAN Europe & Partners Report, TFA: The Forever Chemical in the Water We Drink, July 2024
