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Our society, economy, environment and health depend on each of us having access to reliable, clean and affordable water every day. Your European water services strive every day to do this.

Much EU legislation to better protect people and the planet has been passed or is being processed since the last European Parliament elections – the Drinking Water Directive, the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, and legislation covering agriculture, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. One other cornerstone of water legislation – the Water Framework Directive – will need to define its post 2027 ambitions, and policy makers must decide whether to extend its reach to protect water resources. We support such a move.

We need a robust 360° strategy at European level to ensure that water services are protected across all areas. In our vision for our water’s future, we call on EU to prioritise:

1. Giving water its right place

2. Protecting the quality of our water resources

3. Addressing climate change

4. Enhancing the Circular Economy

5. Financing change while keeping water services affordable

6. Improving security and resilience and guaranteeing the protection of sensitive information.

Read more in our Water Resilience Strategy for Europe; Our vision for our water’s future.

Our world is changing rapidly and so are water services. Innovation is key to guaranteeing the affordability of safe, sustainable and resilient water services for the decades to come. Water service providers are well aware of the challenges and have identified a number of technological and non-technological areas requiring particular innovation efforts with a view to meeting the goals of the European Green Deal. New challenges have also placed a particular focus on the need for innovation across the sector’s supply chain to boost resilience as well as sustainability.

The research needs are compiled in this document and should help policy makers in designing research and innovation programmes in a way that responds to the real needs of drinking water and wastewater operators.

While EurEau welcomes the Commission’s action to address the condition of soils, we regret the lower ambition shown by the proposed Directive on Soil Monitoring and Resilience compared to the abandoned project of a Soil Health Law. The monitoring rules laid down in the proposal are necessary but not sufficient. They should be accompanied by binding rules to protect and regenerate healthy soils. The Directive should incorporate stronger links with surface- and groundwater quality, as well as Circular Economy goals. Strong action for healthy soils is paramount for both drinking- and wastewater operators.

EurEau supports the Drinking Water Directive’s (DWD) goal of reducing water leakage, but emphasises the need for reliable data to underpin this effort. As the first step towards leakage reduction plans will involve calculating a Union average leakage rate, Member States must include the same index in their reporting. This index should be based on volumetric units so that all drinking water operators can easily implement it within the DWD timeframe.

The revision of this Regulation offers the possibility to adjust the requirements for detergents. In the view of drinking water and wastewater operators, the Commission’s proposal clearly lacks ambition and major environmental impacts are not sufficiently addressed.

The new Regulation should respond to the EU’s Zero Pollution ambition by strengthening the biodegradability requirements for all ingredients, including surfactants, avoiding the risk of microplastics generation, ensuring the safe use of microorganisms and reducing the release of phosphorous into the sewer network while strengthening phosphorous recycling.

EurEau supports the Commission’s approach to promoting environmental protection coupled with access to medicines. While the proposal offers long-overdue advances in controlling pollution from pharmaceuticals at the source, it must go further in curbing excessive use of over-the-counter medicines, take into account risks posed by metabolites and transformation products, and provide further transparency for environmental risk assessments.

On 23 February 2023, the European Commission presented its proposal for a Regulation for measures to reduce the cost of deploying gigabit electronic communications networks (gigabit infrastructure act, GIA). This proposal aims at facilitating the deployment of broadband infrastructure in line with the 2030 digital compass and the digital decade policy programme.

The expansion of high-performance networks for electronic communication is very important for the water sector. EurEau welcomes that drinking water infrastructure is exempt from the scope of the Regulation. The EU institutions should also take into account the special status of critical infrastructures when it comes to access to physical infrastructures and related data.

2022 saw a welcome return to a more usual life after the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020-21. It was not without its challenges, however. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February set off a chain of reactions that reverberated throughout the year, invoking energy-reduction and energy-efficiency measures to deal with the fallout. Also linked to it were supply chain disruptions, which impacted the delivery of essential chemicals necessary in water treatment processes.

Read about our work on these challenges and other issues affecting the water sector in our annual report for 2022.

Directive 2022/0344 amends the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and its two daughter directives, the Groundwater Directive (GWD) and the Environmental Quality Standards Directive (EQSD).

The proposal adds pesticides, pharmaceuticals and PFAS to the priority substances lists for surface water and groundwater, and sets more flexible procedures to update Environmental Quality Standards (EQS).

EurEau welcomes the enlargement of the EQS lists as a prerequisite to providing safe and affordable drinking water services to consumers and as an effective means of protecting the environment.

If EQS are exceeded, the EU and Member States are obliged to take action to curb the emissions. EurEau requests that, in line with Article 191.2 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), any exceedance of EQS should primarily trigger control-at-source measures.

EurEau welcomes the European Commission’s Proposal for a Directive concerning urban wastewater treatment (recast) as its more ambitious objectives will align better with the overarching UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the European Green Deal while enhancing the governance of the wastewater sector and people’s access to sanitation. Reaching the new goals and requirements as set out in the Proposal will require mainstreaming control at source, significant investments and time.
The purpose of this position paper is to identify the key topics within the Proposal which EurEau members see as the agenda to take forward through the
amendments process, aiming at enabling an effective and efficient implementation and achievement of the Proposal’s objectives.