[Focus] EU single market laws to tackle water
ANDREW RETTMAN
22.03.2007 @ 17:42 CET
EUOBSERVER / FOCUS - The European Commission is drafting a green paper on how to integrate water management and climate change into wider EU policy-making in the agricultural, transport and industry sectors, with the German and Portuguese environment ministers warning that unless water becomes a "mainstream" political issue Europe's economy will pay the cost.
The EU should start making provisions now for the rainy days to come (Photo: wikipedia)
The green paper - a first draft of potential future legislation designed to stimulate public debate - will be out by the middle of 2007, EU official Peter Gammeltoft told EUobserver at a water symposium in Brussels on Thursday (22 March), adding "It is really impossible to separate climate change and water management. All these topics are interlinked and the paper will aim to recognise this."
Ever-creeping European urban and industrial land exploitation - which sees excessive use of ground or lake water in some areas, diversion of rivers and streams for irrigation in others as well as changes in soil composition and deforestation - is threatening to make climate change problems such as floods and droughts worse than they need to be, environment commissioner Stavros Dimas warned.
Taking a swipe at Europe's farmers, he added that environmental "improvements made in one area are [being] eliminated or put in danger by other actions...availability of water is not always taken into account in terms of which types of crops or how much to grow" with the EU's own €48 billion a year Common Agricultural Policy helping shape Europe's farm-linked water problems.
"Integration of water policy and the aims of the Water Framework Directive [a major, seven year-old EU law on clean water] into policies across the chemicals or transport sectors is not yet satisfactory," the German EU presidency's environment minister Sigmar Gabriel said. "The whole of the internal market must take up the consideration of proper water management."
Mr Gabriel explained that global warming-related changes in rainfall will see more wet weather in eastern Europe in future, less rain in the Mediterranean basin and more rain rather than snow all across Europe, with floods becoming more common than ever before. The weather shifts will also see 5 to 15 percent drops in groundwater resources in the UK and 20 percent drops in groundwater in the catchment area of one of Europe's greatest rivers, the Elbe.
But current and upcoming EU trade and industry legislation does not address how industrial land use is making matters worse, how floods or changes in rainfall patterns will alter the competitive environment for corporations situated across the EU's 27 members or who should pay for hitting environmental targets in areas where green issues and profit margins clash.
The potential political fallout from the policy vacuum was underlined by German conservative MEP Karl-Heinz Florenz, himself a farmer living on the banks of the Rhine. "Our Dutch colleagues should be aware that if they put water into this river at one point, it will affect water levels elsewhere," he said, swiftly adding "I'm not saying the Dutch are bad neighbours" to soften his words.
"There are many countries that get water absolutely free from us now, we can't carry on accepting these inequalities," the MEP went on, with Germany rating high in Europe in terms of managing rivers such as the Danube, Elbe or Rhine which flow past its borders to be used by towns and corporations in southern and southeastern EU states. "There needs to be a level playing field," Mr Florenz said.
The water economics challenge
Tackling the water economics problem will not be an easy task however, with EU states traditionally happy to agree distant overall targets, but tearing at one another's throats when it comes to the nitty-gritty of budgets and the precise language of EU directives. "The real test here is still before us," Germany's Mr Gabriel said. "When we start to set economic goals and come up with economic measures, conflicts between water and business will become clear."
"There is insufficient use of market-based instruments for environmental goals today," the European Water Association's Jacqueline McGlade said. "A continent such as Europe, which probably has the capacity to send a man to the moon, should surely be able to find plant protection products [pesticides] that don't end up going into groundwater," the German MEP, Mr Florenz added.
One of the key aspects of the Water Framework Directive - analysis of water services pricing with a view to EU-wide water pricing norms in 2010 - was spotlighted by the European Commission on Thursday as an area where EU states have done the least work in the past seven years. Mr Dimas' hope - that EU water pricing reforms will promote water efficiency and stimulate technological innovation by 2015 - seems optimistic in 2007.
The Greek commissioner's counterpart, Danish agriculture commissioner Mariann Fischer-Boel - who was due to address the Thursday water conference on how water management could fit into Common Agricultural Policy reforms - did not turn up. "She went to Sicily. She is looking at some farms and giving a speech," one of her press officers said.