Joint letter providing input to the Water Directors’ meeting 27 November 2024

This joint letter, co-signed by the six EU environmental NGOs forming the Living Rivers Europe coalition, provides some recommended inputs for EU Water Directors ahead of their meeting on 27 November 2024. Concretely, it includes the need to focus on the:

• upcoming trilogue negotiations on the update of the lists of Surface Water and Groundwater Pollutants (updating the WFD, GWD, and EQSD)
• European Water Resilience Strategy: “healthy freshwater ecosystems” first

Specifically, it calls on Water Directors to:

• Enforce a systematic prioritisation of nature-based solutions as a pathway to resilience;
• Secure the adoption of a sound ecological flow regime for all rivers in Europe so that enough water remains in the landscape;
• Enact measures limit net water abstractions in the most water-stressed regions, which are additional to water efficiency measures in order to make sure that water savings from water efficiency result in a net decrease in water abstractions.