Meeting: Water Directors meeting, Bratislava 28-29 November 2016
Agenda point: 6. WFD reporting and link to ex-ante conditionalities in ERDF and EARDF
Title: Update from the Commission on the status of WFD reporting and its link to ex-ante conditionalities in ERDF and EARDF
Version no.: 1
Date: 11 November 2016
The Water Directors are invited to:
- ensure that reporting in WISE of the 2nd RBMP is completed as soon as possible (if not done yet for adopted plans) as it is essential for the Commission's assessment of implementation that will be the basis for the future review of the WFD and the assessment of water ex-ante conditionalities.
- take note of the Commission and EEA plans to make the WISE data available
Contacts:
Marija Simunovic [
Joaquim Capitão [
Contents
1. Update on the status of WFD reporting 2
2. Availability of the information reported by Member States 2
3. Link to ex-ante conditionalities in ERDF and EARDF 3
1. Update on the status of WFD reporting
According to Article 15 of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the deadline for Member States to communicate their River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs) to the European Commission was 22 March 2016. The WFD Reporting Guidance 2016, which was endorsed by the EU Water Directors in July 2014[1], established the way in which the different aspects of the WFD implementation should be reported to the Commission, through WISE and, more concretely, through the Central Data Repository of Eionet, hosted by the European Environment Agency.
The development of the reporting environment for the 2nd RBMPs includes an automatic Quality Assurance system that helps Member States avoiding inconsistencies among different parts of the reporting, a common problem in the reporting of the 1st RBMPs. This process, however, is quite heavy on IT resource use and, given also to the concomitance with other reporting processes, created some technical problems linked to capacity of the servers. All these problems are now solved.
The current situation is that 15 Member States have uploaded pdf versions of all their RBMPs and 3 more have uploaded most but not all RBMPs[2]. The electronic reporting, in accordance with the WFD Reporting Guidance, has been completed by four Member States. Two others have finalised the reporting for most of their River Basin Districts, while 15 are at different stages of preparation of the files for reporting. It should be noted that a few of the Member States included in this last number have not yet adopted formally their RBMPs and are therefore not yet able to complete the reporting.
2. Availability of the information reported by Member States
Once reporting is completed, the information contained in the geographical (GML) and data (XML) files is imported into a European database. A Commission's contractor is currently developing a "dashboard" that will allow the access to the information in an easily readable and understandable format. The "dashboards" will be accessible through Tableau Public, a cloud-based technology. For the moment the links will not be made public, but the information contained in the dashboards (aggregated data produced on the basis of the information contained in the European database) will be publically available. The database itself will remain in the EEA infrastructure and will not be publically available.
3. Link to ex-ante conditionalities in CF/ERDF[3] and EAFRD[4]
The ex-ante conditionalities on water in CF/ERDF and EAFRD are based on the criteria established in the Common Provisions Regulation for the European Structural and Investment Funds. These criteria are linked to essential elements of implementation under the WFD, namely the water pricing policy (for both funds) and the adoption of a RBMP that is consistent with the WFD obligations (for CF/ERDF).
For those Member States for which, at the time of the adoption of the Operational Programmes and/or Rural Development Programmes, the water ex-ante conditionalities were assessed as not or only partially fulfilled, the Commission will perform a proportionate assessment[5] of the fulfilment on the basis of the information reported in the context of the 2nd RBMP and, if appropriate, additional documents or deliverables that were agreed in the action plans in the respective programmes.
For the Commission to be able to perform this assessment effectively, it is essential that the electronic reporting in WISE according to the WFD Reporting Guidance is completed by the Member States concerned.
2
[1] The final version of the Reporting Guidance (version 6.0.6) is available in the Eionet resources page (http://cdr.eionet.europa.eu/help/WFD/WFD_521_2016/Guidance/WFD_ReportingGuidance.pdf). It is currently being formatted for publication with a CIS guidance number.
[2] http://ec.europa.eu/environment/water/participation/map_mc/map.htm
[3] Cohesion Fund/European Regional Development Fund
[4] European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development
[5] See page 90-91 in http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docgener/informat/2014/eac_guidance_esif_part2_en.pdf