The European Commission has launched a ‘fitness check’ of the Water Framework Directive and the Floods Directive. The feedback period runs between 20 October 2017 – 17 November 2017.
This fitness check will be linked to the review of the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, for which a Roadmap has recently been published. The measures under this Directive are essential for the achievement of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) objectives, and are explicitly integrated in the WFD Programmes of Measures as “basic measures”.
Purpose and scope
The foreseen fitness check evaluates the WFD as foreseen in Articles 19(2) of this Directive and will cover also two Directives directly linked to the WFD: the Groundwater Directive (2006/118/EC) and the Environmental Quality Standards Directive (2008/105/EC), the so-called “daughter-directives” of the WFD. It will also include the Floods Directive (FD, 2007/60/EC), which has been the catalyst for introducing a risk management approach in the dealings of Member States with significant floods across the EU.
The fitness Check will look at the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, coherence and EU added value of the Water Framework Directive (and its ‘daughters’) and the Floods Directive. This will include an assessment of the potential for regulatory simplification and burden reduction. A quantitative assessment of actual costs and benefits including impacts on business will be carried out in as far as possible. The fitness check may identify areas where simplifications or improvements to the legislation or its implementation could be possible and therefore may serve as the basis for further action by the European Commission.
Further information
