WFD History Flashcards
Give a brief history of EU Water legislation
1975 Early Rivers & Lakes Drinking Water Abstraction standards
- 1980 Binding Drinking Water Targets, plus quality objectives for Fish waters, Shellfish, Bathing Waters and Ground Waters, emissions control element being Dangerous Substances Directive.
- 1988 Frankfurt Ministerial seminar (review / improvements / gaps)
- 1991 Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive
- 1991 Nitrates Directive
- 1996 Directive for Integrated Pollution and Prevention Control
- 1998 A new Drinking Water Directive
Why did EU Water Legislation change?
Getting Europes water cleaner, getting citizens involved.
There was pressure for a fundamental rethink of water policy in 1995 when the Commission accepted requests from the European Parliaments environmental committee from the council of environmental ministers for a more citizen centred, coherent policy.
A commission communication was presented to the European Parliament but also invited comment from all interested parties.
The outcome of this consultation process = widespread consensus that the current policy’s objectives and means was fragmented. All parties agreed on the need for a single piece of framework legislation to resolve these problems.
What is the WFD? What are the 3 key parts it focuses on?
The water framework directive (2000/60/EC) is a piece of European legislation that focuses on achieving
the protection,
improvement
and sustainable use of the water environment -
surface freshwaters, ground water, estuaries and coastal waters out to one nautical mile.
When did WFD come into force?
December 2000 and became part of UK law in 2003.
What does the WFD oblige all countries to do?
Achieve at least good ecological status for all waters (and prevent deterioration from current status)
To promote sustainable use of water as a natural resource
To conserve habitats and species that directly depend upon water
Progressively reduce or phase out releases of pollutants that present a significant threat to the aquatic environment and to manage the effects of flooding and drought.
What does the WFD incorporate , the legislation remains stand alone, termed ‘protected areas’ within the WFD.
Habitats and Birds Directive
Urban waste water treatment directive & Nitrates Directive
Bathing Waters Directive
How is WFD being implemented? What is the aim?
The Directive is implemented using Management Plans that operate at the River Basin Scale. The aim being to integrate all aspects of the water cycle avoiding any difficulties that can arise from looking at the various parts of water management in isolation.
Who put together the Severn River Basin Management Plan?
NRW & EA & a liaison panel (LA, NE, Farming, ports and navigation)
What does a river basin management plan contain? What about river sever?
Significant management issues, proposed environmental objectives and a proposed programme of measures needed to achieve them.
In terms of fhfn
What is the status of water bodies based upon? 🐠💦
A monitoring programme composed of water samples and biological samples (fish, benthic inverts, macro algae, sea grass, phytoplankton)
Monitoring is ‘risk based’ - we don’t monitor everything everywhere as it is too costly / impractical.
Eg saltmarsh for morphological pressures, phytoplankton for nutrients, fish for morphological and physics chemical quality.
How are fish surveys conducted in SE?
Seine netting, trawling, species counted & measured.
Look at Thin Lipped Grey Mullet
Thornback Ray
COD
What is the classification system used for in terms of WFD?
Classification is a way of measuring the health of the environment & the evidence base used to drive improvement measures.
What does the WFD require in terms of classification?
- Assess the pressures on the water environment
- Take the health check
- Tailer monitoring to reflect the pressures using the parameters most sensitive to the local pressure.
- Results run through statistical tools to produce a classification (High to poor)
This is called RISK BASED APPROACH
What does high / good / moderate / poor to bad status represent?
High status = Almost totally undisturbed - reference conds
Good status = we see an allowable deviation from reference conds
Moderate = where we need to start taking action. Environmental standards defined in UK TAG report would be breached and pollutant tolerant species would outweigh more sensitive ecology.
Poor to bad - successively worse and where we end up with the only hardiest wildlife surviving.
What does ecological status incorporate?
Biological quality elements (in estuaries : phytoplankton, Macroalage (seaweeds), Angiosperms (sea grassess, salt marshes, fish, benthic, inverts which can be high, good, moderate, poor, bad & general physio chemical quality elements (DIN, DO) which can be high, good , moderate and Annex 8 (19 National pollutants) which will either pass (high) or fail (moderate).
So only a biological element can determine Poor or Bad status.
