Legal and political context

Content taken from the “Science and the Water Framework Directive – 20 years of hydrobiology research to achieve good ecological status in aquatic environments” dossier

On 23 October 2000, the European Parliament and Council adopted the Water Framework Directive (WFD), a ground-breaking environmental public policy in many respects. Its aim: to halt the deterioration of continental aquatic environments and restore water bodies to good status. In 2006, the Law on Water and Aquatic Environments (Lema) transposed the WFD into national law.

To achieve good ecological status for aquatic environments, the WFD is based on water management at the level of major European river basins. It introduces a dynamic “adaptive management” procedure that involves assessing, diagnosing and prioritising the pressures on aquatic environments. Good status objectives are set at the smallest scale, that of “water bodies”, which correspond to homogenous portions of rivers, water bodies, transitional waters, coastal waters and groundwater. A monitoring programme describes the system for monitoring the state of the environment. The data collected as part of this programme is regularly reported to the European Commission. The aim is to define a management plan for each river basin, setting out the environmental objectives, and a programme of measures defining the actions to be taken to achieve these objectives. The management plan, programme of measures and monitoring programme are reviewed every 6 years. They are based on an arsenal of tools and methods that are also necessary for setting up monitoring networks and a permanent reference network, the keystone of adaptive management. In France, the representatives of the stakeholders in the catchment area take part in this process within the consultation and decision-making bodies known as “basin committees”.

As each Member State develops its own methods for assessing the state of aquatic environments, a harmonisation phase, known as inter-calibration, became necessary. For example, it was necessary to be able to compare the results obtained for Alpine or Mediterranean aquatic environments by neighbouring countries.

Science needs and contributions from INRAE

Content taken from the dossier “Science and the Water Framework Directive – 20 years of hydrobiology research to achieve good ecological status in aquatic environments”.

In 2000, the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) set Member States the challenge of restoring European water bodies to good ecological status within twenty years. At the time, knowledge was lacking to implement the directive, so in 2007 the Ministry of the Environment’s Directorate for Water and Biodiversity (DEB) and the National Office for Water and Aquatic Environments (Onema) entered into a major collaboration with a number of research bodies. Cemagref/Irstea and INRA (now INRAE) were among the first partners to join forces, with research being carried out in hydrology, biology and ecology. While work is continuing to achieve the objective of good ecological status, the contribution of science to the implementation of this innovative and ambitious public environmental policy is already significant. This long-term commitment should make it possible to contribute, on the one hand, to the establishment of a monitoring system and, on the other, to the development of quality indicators. To achieve this, a number of disciplines are called upon, from hydrology to ecology, statistics and sociology, since science in support of public policy is also a human story.

By introducing a systems approach, the WFD poses a number of scientific challenges: a better understanding of the ecology of species living in the same territory or their communities; a better understanding of the functioning of ecosystems subject to multiple pressures and their dynamics; providing methods and tools capable of integrating the complexity of ecological systems. Some of these points are still scientific challenges in the face of global change.

Already known in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but never before used to consider the quality of the environment and aquatic environments in Europe, the principle of bio-indication adopted by the WFD raises new questions for science: what is meant by the ‘good ecological status’ of water bodies? What is the baseline against which it should be assessed? How should organisms be sampled to construct bioindicators? Which bio-indicators should be used to reflect the impact of all pressures? How can we assess the degree of uncertainty associated with each indicator? And many other questions besides… To answer them, the State services, its public establishments and scientists are making a rapid and long-term joint commitment.