| WRc successfully completes 6th year of support to the Commission for WFD implementation
Since 2004, WRc has been the European Commission’s main contractor for support in the development and practical implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) through the Common Implementation Strategy (CIS). WRc has led a consortium of European experts and institutions to provide the necessary expertise to cover all EU 27 Member States and the 23 official languages of the EU.
Experts from WRc and the consortium have been involved in achieving the 4 main objectives of the contract during 2008 - 2009:
- Providing technical secretariat support and expertise to the Strategic Co-ordination Group, WFD Article 21 Committee, and CIS Working Groups covering ecological status (ECOSTAT), groundwater, reporting, floods, eutrophication, environmental objectives and exemptions, agriculture and the WFD, climate change, and chemical monitoring activity.
Significant outputs include the publication of Guidance Documents on Eutrophication Assessment, reporting under the Water Framework Directive, exemptions to the environmental objectives, and groundwater status and trend assessment.
 Supporting the Commission in new policy developments
Significant outputs include a concept paper on reporting under the Floods Directive and draft Floods Reporting Sheets.
- Providing technical assistance to the Commission in the development of the Water Information System for Europe (WISE).
Significant outputs include the translation of the WFD reporting requirements into electronic format (XML schema) to facilitate the reporting of data by MS to the Commission via WISE. This has been accomplished for Article 3 (Competent Authorities and River Basin Districts), Article 5 (Characteristics of the RBDs including pressures and impacts and economic analysis of water use), Article 6 (Register of Protected Areas), Article 8 (Monitoring programmes), and, most recently, Article 13 (River Basin Management Plans) which is currently being tested in advance of the 2010 reporting exercise. In addition, the Guidance Document on GIS elements of the WFD was extended and updated to take account developments within WISE and the integration of other EU water policy reporting (such as the Urban Waster Water Treatment Directive, Bathing Waters Directive, Nitrates Directive and others).
- Providing techninal assistance to the Commission in the assessment and compliance checking of WFD implementation. The availability of electronic data in WISE has led to new developments in compliance assessment – the process whereby the Commission checks that the directive has been transposed into national systems and is being implemented and reported in a way that conforms to the directive requirements. Some of the compliance checking is automated but much of it requires the attention of a team of expert assessors who can cover all EU 27 Member States and its 23 official languages.
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Significant outputs include WRc’s management of the compliance checking of the Article 8 electronic data submitted by the Member States. This involved the identification and mobilisation of appropriate expert assessors from both within WRc and the consortium, the full assessment of the data submitted relating to surface waters and groundwaters, the quality assurance of all assessments, the production of statistics, graphs and maps to accompany the assessments. These outputs featured in the second implementation report by the Commission to the European Parliament addressing the establishment of monitoring programmes for surface water and groundwater. This was publicised at the European Water Conference in April 2009.
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