EU Council agrees to negotiating mandate to update list of surface water and pollutants

The Council of the European Union has agreed to its negotiating mandate on the directive, which will amend the water framework directive, the groundwater directive, and the directive on environmental quality standards. The proposal includes an update on priority substances and environmental quality standards in surface water and groundwater. New pollutants and related quality standards for some per- and poly-fluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS), pharmaceuticals, and pesticides have now been added to the list of priority pollutants.

The Council’s mandate balances ambitious goals for the EU’s water policy with flexibility for member states in implementing water legislation, maintaining a level playing field, and reducing administrative burden.

The Council has taken another important step towards further improving the quality of European water. Reducing pollutants and extending the monitoring to new substances, like forever chemicals or pharmaceuticals, in surface waters and groundwater is crucial to protecting human health and our ecosystems.

The Commission’s proposal to add quality standards for non-relevant metabolites of pesticides has been simplified. The Council also added the obligation for the Commission to establish a list of known pesticides, indicating whether they are relevant.

Member states agreed to maintain the Commission’s proposal for listing individual pharmaceutical products, such as painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, and antibiotics. The negotiating mandate provides a stepwise approach when there is evidence that stricter quality standards must be set to protect the ecosystem.

The water framework directive requires member states to submit their river basin management plans and report on the status of water bodies in their countries. The current directive applies a one-out-of-all-out principle, which means that all ecological and chemical indicators should meet the quality standards set in EU legislation.

This principle makes it difficult to show overall progress. Therefore, member states agreed that the Commission will set indicators at EU level to measure progress uniformly, even in situations where not all quality standards are in good standing.

The negotiating mandate provides intermediate reporting, new monitoring techniques, including remote sensing, and the possibility of setting up an EU-wide monitoring facility to help member states with their tasks.

Member states also clarified the concept of deterioration of a water body's status: short-term activities with no lasting consequences or relocation of already existing pollution within or between waterbodies will not be considered deterioration as long as they do not produce an overall increase in pollution.

The negotiating mandate narrows the scope of groundwater substances identified as being of national concern and sets EU-wide values only for synthetic substances. In addition, member states will have until 2039 to achieve good groundwater chemical status.

As groundwater is the primary source of drinking water in many member states, the negotiating mandate aligns the groundwater PFAS requirement with the drinking water directive, which sets quality standards for 20 PFAS and includes quality standards for the four most problematic PFAS.

The negotiating mandate introduces a mandatory 'watch list mechanism' for groundwater like the one already in place for surface water. The Council clarified that microplastics and anti-microbial resistance genes would be included in the watch list only once harmonised monitoring and evaluation standards are in place.

In their negotiating mandate, member states stressed the need to update the relevant pollutants list for surface water and groundwater through legislative acts adopted according to the ordinary legislative procedure instead of the initial proposal to amend them via delegated acts of the Commission.

The negotiating mandate allows member states to transpose the directive in two years instead of 18 months, as the Commission initially proposed.

The agreement on the Council’s negotiating mandate allows its presidency to start talks with the European Parliament on the final text. The European Parliament adopted its position on 24 April 2024.

Chemical pollution of surface and groundwater poses a threat to the aquatic environment, with effects such as acute and chronic toxicity in marine organisms, accumulation of pollutants in the ecosystem and loss of habitats and biodiversity, as well as to human health.

This proposal addresses the legal obligation of the EU to review the lists of pollutants affecting surface and groundwaters regularly. Setting environmental standards contributes to the European Green Deal's zero-pollution ambition of having an environment free of harmful pollution by 2050.