Water: Towards a Culture of Responsibility

3: Europe Sets a Goal - A Return to Good Water Quality

III. EUROPE SETS A GOAL: A RETURN TO GOOD WATER QUALITY In more than one respect, 2015 will be a crucial year for water management . It is the target date for the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals to be achieved, and it also marks, for the European Union, the end of the period in which member states must restore water quality in compliance with the Water Framework Directive of 2000, a major change of direction in EU water policy. EUROPE: 30 YEARS OF WATER POLICIES The construction of Europe goes back nearly 60 years, at least if we take as a starting point the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) in 1951. European water policy is more recent, but it is already crowned with success. The policy goes back 33 years: a third of a century committed to protecting the environment and its inhabitants . One of the most fundamental documents was the 1975 Directive concerning the quality of surface water, followed a year later by Directives on dangerous substances and on bathing water. By protecting the environment, European policies sought first of all to protect Europeans. Several measures resulted from this: the regular strengthening of standards of drinking water quality; the introduction of new limits on substances such as bromates and trihalomethanes in 1998; a regular review of technical advances in analytical monitoring; the transfer of the sampling point, when checking the quality of drinking water, from the public branch-pipe to the consumer’s tap. All these key elements are part of a deliberate policy to improve public health, which has been passed on determinedly within the member states by governments and the bodies responsible for drinking water. In the 1990s the enormous construction work involved with cleaning up water began. The 1991 Framework Directive on urban waste water treatment (transposed into French law by the 1992 law on water) demanded that every city, town and village should have a waste water treatment system, following a timetable according to the size of the community and the date on which they joined the EU (2005 for the first 15 member states, 2015 for the latest 12 to join). This major enactment put water policy at the heart of European environmental thinking. All 42 WATER THE WATER CENTURY over Europe, from capitals populated by millions of citizens to small Alpine towns, people began building, making waste water collection networks and treatment plants reliable and bringing them up to standard . It must be said that some did this more willingly than others, but the movement was launched and there was no turning back. It is mainly through this policy that rivers are no longer “wide polluted avenues”: it has restored rivers to greater health and enabled the return of fish species in water courses that had previously been devastated by urban waste. Today, 32 species of fish have been counted in the Seine, compared with only three in 1970. In July 2008, upstream from Paris, a fisherman even caught a sea trout, a migratory fish which demands extremely clean water, and a catch the fisherman had never before experienced. This water policy – despite having certain weaknesses – was on the whole positive; but it also had its ups and downs. The first difficulty was a result of the creation of what was effectively a new public service, that of waste water cleansing, without explaining to people its ultimate objective , which was to bring large numbers and varieties of fish back into rivers. Nor was it made clear how it was going to be financed by users, even though southern European countries benefited from Cohesion Funds. As a consequence, water bills rose sharply at an economically and socially difficult time, sparking questions about the “fair” price of water. In Spain, a payment strike was organised, spreading into several towns and cities, notably in Catalonia. Elected representatives, administrators and operators seemed collectively to forget that the common good represented by water demands the support of consumers over prices as well as services. They also underestimated the need to educate the public about the new standards, and overestimated the willingness of users of water and cleansing services to pay for the benefits of better protection of rivers, through a sharp increase in their bills. The second difficulty with this European water policy, and by no means the least, concerned its application in countries with a low population density. Measured by surface area, France is the largest country in the EU, but in terms...