Water Directors meetings are held every six months as part of the Commission’s activities. Last year we described a meeting in Vienna. In June 2023, another meeting was held in Stockholm. Materials from the meeting are now available on the EU CIRCA BC website. The organization of the meeting place of the Water Directors is rotating. Every six months the meeting is organized by a different country. The topics of the meetings are decided in advance and often concern current issues related to water management topics. Many times the meetings are combined with meetings of Marine Directors.
The Water Directors’ meetings also provide important information on progress in implementing EU directives, including. Floods Directive and Water Framework Directive. At the last event in June, progress in reporting water management plans in the various member countries, including Poland, was discussed.
How do we compare to Europe in reporting?
Progress in reporting varies from country to country. According to the requirements of the Water Framework Directive, the adoption period for individual water management plan documents should have ended in December 2021, and reporting was due by March 2022. So much for theory, because as the European Commission materials presented at the Water Directors’ meeting show, only two countries have completed the process. These include Austria and the Netherlands. Latvia and the Czech Republic are also close to completing reporting. Poland has submitted the water management plan documents in force until March 2023 in pdf format and completed spatial data reporting. The main part of the report on the state of the waters, environmental objectives and planned measures has not yet been reported by our country.
Why the problems in reporting?
Filling out the report is done using an IT tool prepared by the European Commission. The logic for populating the database is defined top-down and requires full compliance for the report to be accepted and sent. In the previous planning cycle, adjusting national data was a major challenge. It seems that filling the base is a problem. Poland, however, is not alone in reporting delays. Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Bulgaria, Croatia, Ireland and Slovenia had not even sent adopted water management plans by early June. Belgium is in the midst of public consultations, and Greece has not yet begun the 6-month consultation procedure. So it remains to be hoped that the reporting process will be completed quickly. Indeed, the delay is already more than a year.