# **Box  5.5  EU Water Framework Directive and wastewater use**

The Water Framework Directive (WFD), adopted by the European Parliament in 2000. It contains many of the principles of IWRM, including managing water quantity and quality for surface and groundwater, treating water as having an economic value, and enhancing consultation and participation. Its key requirement is the production of river basin management plans by all EU countries.

With regard to the WFD and wastewater treatment and use, a number of activities have been and are being carried out. First of all, the 1991 Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive (UWWTD) establishes the principle “Treated wastewater shall be reused whenever appropriate.” In 2004, the third UWWTD implementation report concluded by stating that the challenges to implementing the WFD include: “... wastewater treatment, as well as wastewater reuse in order to ensure human health and protect the environment will receive further importance due to increased floods and droughts as a consequence of climate change.” The European Commission (EC) launched the AQUAREC project Integrated Concepts for Reuse of Upgraded Wastewater to investigate strategies, technologies and management practices for local, safe, publicly acceptable, economically feasible and sustainable use of treated wastewater for urban, peri-urban and agricultural use. The project found a growing acceptance of wastewater use practices, with more than 200 municipal wastewater use projects in Europe. However, the project found that only a limited fraction of the wastewater use potential is actually exploited. The results of the AQUAREC project provide a comprehensive overview of wastewater use concepts together with valuable knowledge and guidance to a whole range of stakeholders on their practical implementation, based on European, Israeli and Australian full-scale experiences.

The AQUAREC project found that EU financial institutions play a key role in favoring wastewater use schemes through existing subsidy programs that cover a number of areas, including planning, technical assistance and research, construction costs, actions contributing to regional objectives that are not locally costeffective, and pay-for-performance incentives. Subsidies do not cover operation and maintenance costs.

In 2007, the European Commission (EC) carried out an in-depth assessment of water scarcity and droughts in the European Union. Following this assessment, in 2008 the EC launched a study “Assessment of alternative water supply options” to assess four alternative water supply options in Europe, namely desalination, wastewater use, ground water recharge, and rainwater harvesting. The study found that alternative water supply options can be successfully used to solve water management problems, both related to droughts, storm water management and water quality issues. For some of the regions studied, alternative water supplies are becoming the largest contributors to meeting water demand.

According to the EU Water Scarcity and Drought working group, the overall economic impact of drought events in the last 30 years at the EU level was around €100 billion. If the EU had achieved a 20% wastewater use target to reduce water scarcity in Europe this could have reduced the economic impact of drought in the EU by €20 billion in the last 30 years.

Finally, the EC also provides grants for research on wastewater use for agriculture. One example includes the AQUATEC project for southern Italy that evaluated the effectiveness of membrane filtration, simplified treatments (skipping nutrient removal processes), storage reservoirs, and constructed wetlands technologies to produce safe treated effluent for irrigation.

_Sources:_ EU, 2000; EC, 2004; AQUAREC, 2006; Lopez _et al._ , 2006; Bixio and Witgens, 2006; MED-EUWI, 2007; Campling _et al._ , 2008.

Finally, there may be an organization such as a national or regional planning body or river basin authority concerned with water resource allocation and the enforcement of water laws specifying water use rights and/or water quality standards.

These varying sectoral interests and responsibilities must be considered and reconciled if a wastewater use is to succeed. As an ideal, wastewater use for irrigation and strategies for its 58