WFD and agriculture activity of the EU: first linkages between the CAP and the WFD at EU Level

Abstract

Within the "WFD and agriculture activity" both communities agreed to co-operate during implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and further development of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) at EU, Commission and the Member States levels. In intensive discussions including two congresses and biannual working group meetings, seven information reports were produced. Rural Development programmes are unanimously considered to be very powerful instrument to support WFD implementation. However, limited budgets, combined with the large extent of agricultural pressures will considerably restrain the results this instrument might deliver. Limited effects are also expected from the cross-compliance standards, mainly because: the standards do not cover all WFD aspects, and the existing legislation is not implemented with the same rigour in all the Member States. WFD provides additional powerful tools (River Basin Management Planning and Water Pricing discussion) to improve the situation, but the timetables of WFD and CAP do not fit each other. The activity should be continued with an intensive discussion on case and success stories in all the mentioned tools informing both policy areas for the planned evaluation of cross-compliance in 2007, and a mid-term evaluation on rural development in 2009.

Irrigated Agriculture and the Cost Recovery Principle of Water Services: Assessment and Discussion of the Case of the Guadalquivir River Basin (Spain)

“…Nevertheless, and despite the advances in last decade, the coordination of the CAP and water environmental policies still needs to be further improved to achieve a more sustainable use of water resources [20,53]. This might also require a reformulation of the CRP to account for external environmental costs of irrigated agriculture, for the implementation of innovative recovery cost instruments to finance the foreseen environmental measures in the PoMs [54], and for the revision of exceptions and greening standards set in the CAP with respect to agricultural water use [14].…”

Action Research’s Potential to Foster Institutional Change for Urban Water Management

“…The processes of implementing these various aspects of the Directive, meanwhile, became a veritable field of social science studies. Early assessments highlighted the need for collaboration across sectors and levels and set out agendas for research to support the implementation of the WFD [21][22][23][24], cf. [25].…”

Governing desertification in Mediterranean Europe: The challenge of environmental policy integration in multi‐level governance contexts

“…Procedures for integrating Water Directive provisions in RDPLANs and their coordination and alignment with the drafting of River Basin Management Plans (RBMP) (they have incompatible timetables) have been proposed. GFP codes and establishment of minimum standards, embedded in RDPLANs, constitute a shared instrument of the CAP and the Water Directive included in the 'programme of measures' of the RBMPs (CCB, 2003;Wallin, 2004;Kallis et al, 2005;Mohaupt et al, 2007).…”