Benefits In Achieving Sustainable Water Management Across The Eurozone Essay

Benefits In Achieving Sustainable Water Management Across The Eurozone - Essay Example Many grounds and surface water bodies in EU are yet daunted with high concentrations of phosphorus and nitrogen (Bouraoui et al 2014). Following the EC (2012), there exist doubts that many numbers of water bodies in EU may not reach the required objectives of WFD by 2015 (Kafflis & Butler 2001) This essay will analyze how successfully WFD has been in introducing an ecosystem-oriented approach for EUs water resource management and water policy. Availability of water to agricultural sector places heavy pressure on available water bodies and to contain nutrient pollution still plays a significant threat to lakes, surface, transitional and groundwater quality in EU. Earlier, with the introduction of Nitrates Directive 91/676/EEC/1991, EU was able to minimize nitrogen losses from the agricultural sector and after two decades of the existence of such Directive, EU is successful in preventing in its member states, which have agriculture as their dominant industry such as Belgium, the Nether lands, France, etc. Accordingly the European Council (2010), due to the introduction of 1991 Nitrates Directive, there had been a 55% fall in nitrate concentration trends in EU member states. According to Bouraoui and Grizetti (2011), the Urban Waste Water Directive 1991/271/EEC was successful in minimizing the phosphorus losses to water bodies in Europe and also resulted in a lower magnitude of nitrogen losses(Bouraoui et al 2014:1). The WFD observed that with about three-fourths of EUs drinking-water supplies being derived from the groundwater sources, its prime significance is to guarantee the quality of groundwater. Three unique varieties of monitoring are specified to evaluate the quality status of European waters such as surveillance, supervising or monitoring, operational supervising and investigative supervising (Kallis & Butler 2001).