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From helping shape the EU Water Resilience Strategy to defending the Polluter Pays Principle, advocating for stronger protection against PFAS, and celebrating 50 years of bringing Europe’s water professionals together, 2025 showed why water must remain at the heart of Europe’s future.

Inside the report you’ll find:
💧 Our policy achievements
💧 Key advocacy milestones
💧 New publications and technical work
💧 The people and partnerships behind our work
💧 What comes next for Europe’s water sector

Thank you to all our members, experts and partners who contributed throughout the year.

Europe’s water services providers continue to deliver safe drinking water and wastewater services to most people across the continent. But behind this strong performance, ageing infrastructure, rising costs and new environmental challenges are putting future resilience at risk.

An overview of Europe’s water stats in 2025

The simplification of environmental assessments needs to strike the right balance to avoid creating loopholes for sectors with significant environmental footprints.

FIEC and EurEau encourage the EU to maintain EPR in the recast UWWTD

Call to swiftly implement the recast UWWTD to protect public health, the environment and Europe’s competitiveness

The Commission proposal for the ‘Simplification and strengthening of food and feed safety requirements’ modifies the conditions for placing pesticides and biocides on the market It contains welcome measures to accelerate access to the market for new biocontrol substances and products.
However, several proposals will negatively affect compliance with article 7.3 of the Water Framework Directive and the requirements of the Drinking Water Directive, such as unlimited approval period of most active substances. Furthermore, it must be possible to ban pesticide uses easily and promptly as soon as monitoring data show that the environmental quality objectives of the Water Framework Directive are at risk from these substances. We call on the co-legislators to ensure the full protection of drinking water resources and avoid legal uncertainty between Regulation 1107/2009 and the DWD.

Protecting our drinking water resources in a changing geopolitical climate

The INSPIRE Directive must be consistent with EU legislation aimed at protecting critical entities and vital societal services. The protection of public health and the environment must prevail over the right to access certain spatial data. Member States should be required to ensure that spatial data of infrastructure managed by the sectors listed in the annex to Directive 2022/2557 should not be made publically accessible, unless it are not security-relevant.

The limitation only applies to spatial data and not to environmental data.