Informal meeting of EU Water directors

London Docklands, 28-29 November 2005

Item 2: Common Implementation Strategy

WG B activities

River Basin management plans: a necessary connection between elaboration and reporting

The WFD represents an important change in the management of water compared to the former “sectorial” directives such as UWWD, drinking water directive, ...

The main three new principles of the WFD are:

- the setting of a good ecological status to be reached by all raw waters by 2015

- the promotion of integrated river basin management (IRBM) through the adoption of river basin management plans (RBMP)

- the transparency by a wide involvement of water users to water management

These three principles are mainly dealing with an integrated management of water resources. The main tool to obtain this management is the RBMP. In Europe, quite all the countries are working hard to prepare the first implementation of RBMP by 2009.

At the same time, within the CIS, Member States, the Commission and stakeholders are working on several topics in order to facilitate WFD implementation. The working groups of the CIS are dealing with key issues such as: ecological status, environmental objectives, reporting, hydromorphology, ...

Working group B(Integrated River Basin Management)has no mandate to work on RBMP. At this stage this group is working on four heterogeneous activities: pilot river basin, cost effectiveness, water scarcity, research.Even if each activity is producing documents, none of theseactivities has a direct link with the IRBM. Of course, these outputs can partly contribute to help building a RBMP but they are not integrated. It explains the difficulties seen and expressed in the functioning of working group B, which has no mandate to merge these outputs in order to prepare RBMP .

During the last meeting of WG B in October 2005, several participants have asked to work on RBMP. A lot of countries and stakeholders would like to exchange experiences on this topic. But, as this question is not in the mandate of WGB, the members of the group have decided to prepare a first “non paper” on this topic to be discussed during the next meeting of WGB (March/April 2006) and presented at the next SCG in April 2006.

At the same time the Commission, leading the working group on reporting (WG D), intends to produce a document dedicated to reporting for RBMP.

At this stage, we believe that if a reporting document on RBMP has to be developed it is necessary to work on parallel on the content itself of RBMP. It seems difficult to imagine having any stringent requirements on the reporting for RBMP, when no exchanges on the content and the setting up of RBMP will have been established within the CIS process. Without any work on the content,Member States could run the risk of increasing the number of infringement procedures in the future.

According to the text of the WFD and the state of progress of the CIS activities two options seem possible:

- If a document on reporting for RBMPshould be developed without any exchanges on the content of RBMP between MemberStates,stakeholders, and the Commission on RBMP, this document should only be rephrasing the article 15 and annex VII of the WFD. In this case, the documenton reporting shouldonly be:“copies of river basin management plans and all subsequent updates....” (article 15) and the content of RBMP as defined in annex VII.

- If Water Directors agree that there is a need to explain more in depth the content and the reporting on RBMP,exchanges of experiences, between MemberStates,stakeholders and the Commission, should beestablished in order to better define the data and the methodologies necessary for RBMP.

If the work on reporting for RBMP should be more developed than Article 15 and annex VII we believe the CIS should facilitateas soon as possible exchange of experiences on RBMP. To promote these exchanges Germany and France offer to allow all countries and stakeholders interested to present their experiences and proposals during a workshop to be held in early 2006.