The European institutions finally reached a long-awaited political agreement to update EU rules on water pollution. The agreed text, however, weakens existing key environmental protection measures and principles, thereby jeopardising the better protection of European waters. As we await the EU institutions’ final vote to officially adopt the new rules, PAN Europe shares its views.
Europe’s water resources need better protection from pollution, including pesticides. In 2022, the European Commission published a proposal to amend three key pieces of water legislation: Water Framework Directive (WFD) and its daughter directives, the Groundwater Directive (GWD) and Environmental Quality Standards Directive (EQSD). The process was far from straightforward, and instead of a few months, it took three years for European Institutions to reach an agreement, with Members of the European Parliament from two different terms and 6 Council presidencies.
PAN Europe highlights that the agreed text can hardly be considered a success.
Major delays and derogations
The political agreement requires Member States to monitor and limit the pollution caused by numerous new substances, including more pesticides (such as glyphosate), a group of PFAS and – for the first time – pharmaceuticals. This is the good part.
But Member States have managed to severely weaken their obligations. They have successfully negotiated extended compliance deadlines for the recently added substances. They are now only required to achieve ‘good status’ for these substances by the year 2039. There is even a provision for a delay until 2045 [1]. It should be noted that the initial overarching deadline for Member States to achieve good status across all European water bodies is 2027 [2].
Despite 200,000 people voicing their opposition to the deregulation of environmental laws [3], the political agreement incorporated the wish of Member States (and industry) to weaken the existing non-deterioration principle of the WFD. It introduced two new exemptions that allow legally short-term negative impacts and deterioration when there is relocation of water or sediments.
What are the main changes for surface water pollutants?
The political agreement increased EU-wide surface water bodies protection by including 24 individual new substances to the list of priority substances. These substances – which the Member States will now have to incorporate in their annual monitoring programme – include pesticides, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals, as well as a group of 25 PFAS, including Trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), – an addition from the original European Commission’s proposal.
The political agreement failed to introduce ambitious measures to tackle pesticide pollution from glyphosate in surface waters. Although the European Commission’s proposal included glyphosate on the list of new pollutants, the thresholds are very high: 86.7 µg/l for inland surface waters (not used for drinking water), and 8.67µg/l for other surface waters. PAN Europe and its partners strongly advocated harmonising these thresholds at 0.1 µg/l, and while this was accepted by the European Parliament, it was then rejected by the Member States.
The initially proposed total pesticide threshold in surface water to include all pesticides was also rejected. Now it has been transformed to include only the sum of active substances in pesticides listed in the list of priority substances, with glyphosate excluded. In practice, Member States effectively eradicated any prospect of increasing protection of the environment and human health against the adverse impacts of mixture effects, merely postponing the issue for future generations.
What are the main changes for groundwater pollutants?
In the case of groundwater pollutants, protection from pesticides is also weakened. In the case of PFAS substances, the Member States succeeded in aligning the thresholds with the ones from the Drinking Water Directive, which are not based on the latest science on the dangers of human exposure to PFAS, for the sum of 20 PFAS substances. Additionally, the recommendation of the EU scientific SCHEER Committee to include TFA into the sun of PFAS for groundwater [4] was rejected. Correlatively, a separate, more ambitious threshold was included for the sum of 4 PFAS based on EFSA’s opinion [5].
For the protection of groundwater, the European Commission’s proposal included several thresholds for pesticide non-relevant metabolites that are currently not monitored. The Member States delayed this by pushing to first establish a separate list of relevant and non-relevant pesticide metabolites. Although the agreed threshold values can be seen as relatively ambitious, establishing another list relies on a substance-by-substance approach that ignores mixture effects and risks becoming outdated extremely quickly.
Why does this matter – and what happens next?
The repeated delays in adopting the updated water pollution standards leave little time for Member State authorities to plan and incorporate measures to address new pollutants in the next River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs), which must be finalised by the end of 2027.
The new monitoring and reporting rules will improve our understanding of water pollution across Europe. These include a mandatory 'watch list' for groundwater, the use of modern monitoring techniques that capture the combined effects of substances, and regular reporting of monitoring data to the European Environment Agency (EEA). However, the numerous weakening amendments to the proposal and the WFD itself, leave us with a political agreement that will not be fully implemented until at least 2039 and contains threshold levels that are far from sufficient to efficiently protect European waters from pollution.
Next, the political agreement, once revised by lawyers and linguists, needs to be adopted by the three European Institutions before being published in the Official Journal. In the meantime, PAN Europe continues to highlight the state of PFAS pesticides and TFA pollution in water, while pushing for the phase-out of these substances at source.
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Notes:
[1] The political agreement actually includes several timelines to consider: Member States must by 2027, establish a supplementary monitoring programme; by 2030, establish a preliminary programme of measures; by 2033, include a final programme of measures in the 5th RBMPs; by 2039, aim to achieve a good status in relation to the new substances with possibility for extension in 2045.
[2] The European Commission’s assessment of the 3rd River Basin Management Plans (2022-2027) concluded that ‘significant work is needed’ to meet EU targets on freshwater quality and recommended Member States to increase compliance with EU water laws by adhering to pollution limits and to implement additional measures to address persistent environmental challenges, such as chemical pollution.
[3] Hands off nature: nearly 200,000 citizens say no to weakening EU environmental laws, https://www.wwf.eu/wwf_news/media_centre/?19162441/Hands-off-nature-near....
[4] SCHEER - Scientific Opinion on "Draft Environmental Quality Standards for PFAS total under the Water Framework Directive", April 2025, https://health.ec.europa.eu/publications/scheer-scientific-opinion-draft...
[5] PFAS in food: EFSA assesses risks and sets tolerable intake, EFSA (2020) https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/pfas-food-efsa-assessesin-risks-and-s....
