External newsletter - edition 10 - January 2017

European Commission cooperates on water infrastructure security
The Joint Research Centre (JRC) as well as the European Commission’s DG Home Affairs and DG Environment co-organised an event on ‘Water safety and security’ on 12 December in Brussels. EurEau Vice-President Dr Claudia Castell-Exner delivered a presentation on the experience of water utilities in risk management and in crisis management.

Sustainable Development Goals
A high level conference on SDGs was organised by the European Political Strategy Centre on the 20 December in Brussels, featuring keynote speakers such as HM Queen Mathilde of Belgians and the Vice-Presidents of the European Commission; Timmermans and Katainen. The European Commission will develop EU indicators to measure the progress in the achievement of the SDGs. A stakeholders’ platform will be launched to bring this process forward. However, DG Environment is unlikely to work on water-related indicators before 2018.

NATO/EurEau cooperation
On the 15 December 2016 EurEau was invited by NATO to take part in a high-level meeting to discuss civil preparedness and resilience to crisis. EurEau Secretary General Oliver Loebel presented key feature of the European water sector.

Water Framework Directive CIS meetings 
On the 15-16 December EurEau attended the meeting of the WG Chemicals of the WFD CIS. The main topics were priority substances and the strategic approach on pharmaceuticals. The meeting documents are available here.

On the 15 December we were also at the workshop on art.4.7 of the WFD organised by the Ad-hoc Task Group on Art.4.7. The meeting documents are here.

Drinking Water Directive: workshop on materials and products in contact with drinking water
The workshop took place on 19 January to update stakeholders on the activities of the Commission, the four-Member-State-initiative and industry providers of materials in contact with drinking water. The Commission emphasised the political will to develop a European-wide certification scheme although several aspects require further work. A public event will be organised on 18 May 2017.

Pharmaceuticals in the environment
The presentations and the report from the workshop organised by the NGO Health Care Without Harm on this topic can be found here.

Circular Economy
Related to Water Reuse, the European Commission should make public soon the report of the Joint Research Centre on minimum quality requirement for water reuse in irrigation in agriculture and groundwater recharge.

The Commission launched a communications campaign to raise awareness of why water reuse is important. You can see a video interview with EurEau President Bruno Tisserand here. We will share the relevant information on our Twitter page. The Commission’s press release is here.

Fertiliser Regulation
We presented the EurEau vision for the regulation, focusing on quality control in fertilisers and input materials, in the European Parliament on 25 January. The meeting was hosted by the rapporteur of the AGRI committee in the European Parliament, Jan Huitema, the European Sustainable Phosphorus Platform and the Nutrient Platform NL. The reports from the AGRI and ENVI Committees should be published on 2 February with a deadline for amendments on the 7 March. We continue to promote the EurEau position in the European Parliament.

The EurEau position will be approved very soon by the EurEau General Assembly and will be available on the website.

Public consultations
The consultation on policy options to set minimum quality requirements for reused water in the European Union ended on the 27 January 2017. EurEau’s answer can be found here.

Reduced water consumption
The position paper is now available.

Intergroup meeting on water governance
Michel Dantin MEP will host a meeting on ‘Water Governance Across Europe in Light of the Review of the EU Water Framework Directive’ today, February 1. Bruno Tisserand will present the EurEau view on this topic.

Procurement – new ECJ ruling
A new ruling of the ECJ on public procurement and services of general (economic) interest (Remondis vs City of Hannover e.a.) was issued on 21 December 2016.

The ECJ ruled that the transfer of functions by public authorities to an autonomous SPV governed by public law is not necessarily a public contract so that the transfer does not need a procurement procedure. It is an important ruling because the ECJ applied Art 4 of the Treaty of the European Union (identity of the Member State) and Article 1 (6) of the procurement directive 24/2014/EU (act of state organisation).

You can read the judgment here.

News from members
The Danes released their latest report on benchmarking and statistics report ‘Water In Figures.’

EurEau meets its members
On 24-25 January, Oliver spoke at the OVGW symposium ‘Wasserversorgung 2017’ and met with the OWAV team. 

Communications and media
The annual report will be published by the end of February. Keep your eyes out for it!

We are also finalising the ‘Water Matters’ publication that many of you contributed to. This is due for World Water Day on 22 March. Each of your organisations will receive copies to disseminate.

Important dates
8 February: Is EU Water Policy Climate-Change-Proof? – EurEau President Bruno Tisserand will speak at the event hosted by Jo Leinen MEP in the European Parliament and organised by the Environment Working Group of the College of Europe’s Alumni association.
27 March: EurEau Vice President Dr Claudia Castell-Exner will speak at the Drinking Water expert group.
15-17 May: IWA Performance Indicators conference in Vienna.
18 May: Symposium on materials and products in contact with drinking water in Brussels.
6-9 June: ASTEE in Liege, Belgium.
20-22 June: IWA – conference in Trondheim June 2017