IP/05/795
Brussels, 24 June 2005
Environment: Commission welcomes groundwater
agreement but disappointed at INSPIRE deal
Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas welcomed today’s political
agreement by the Environment Council on the proposed directive to protect
groundwater against pollution. But he expressed disappointment with the
Council’s political agreement on the ‘INSPIRE’ directive, designed to remove
obstacles to the sharing of environmentally relevant data, as it is
considerably less ambitious than the Commission’s original proposal.
“Groundwater is an important natural resource; which is mainly used for drinking
water, industry and agriculture. It has a high environmental status as it interacts with
surface waters and wetlands. It is therefore essential to protect it. As gaps remain in
the system, I very much welcome today’s agreement, which bridges these gaps by
providing for specific measures to prevent and control groundwater pollution.”
The Groundwater Directive aims to bring a major improvement in the quality of
Europe’s groundwater, an important source of drinking water in many countries, by
bridging gaps in the existing groundwater protection regime.
The directive will require Member States to monitor and assess the state of their
groundwater and to identify and redress groundwater pollution. It provides clear
specifications to ensure that all groundwaters achieve “good” chemical status. This
ties in with the objective of the Water Framework Directive - the cornerstone of EU
water protection policy - that all EU waters should reach “good” status by 2015.
Improvements to the groundwater directive suggested by the Council include
providing flexibility in the compliance regime regarding the chemical status of
groundwater and clarifying the measures aiming to prevent or limit inputs of
pollutants into groundwater. This flexibility does not weaken the directive but rather
helps Member States to focus on identified environmental risks and to base decisionmaking regarding status classification on thorough risk assessment.
INSPIRE
Concerning the political agreement on the INSPIRE directive, Commissioner Dimas
said: “This agreement does not go far enough towards obliging public data
providers to share their data. Member States need to realise that everyone has an
interest in environmental information being shared and made widely available.” The
Commission did not support the Council’s text for this reason.
The European Parliament, which adopted its first reading opinion on 7 June 2005, is
also in favour of a more ambitious text.
INSPIRE stands for ‘Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Union.‘
The proposed directive will cover a very wide range of spatial data that is used for
environmental policy but also for other policies including disaster prevention and
emergency response. The data to be covered ranges from basic mapping
information, such as geographical names and administrative units, to key
environmental information such as emissions, environmental quality and location of
protected sites.
The directive tackles a series of obstacles which are currently hampering the use of
existing data for policy making. These include poor documentation of data, lack of
technical interoperability between data systems and legal and financial obstacles.
The Commission’s proposal aims to remove these obstacles by obliging public
authorities to improve documentation, comply with rules ensuring that their data
systems are interoperable, share their data with each other and give the public
access to the data through a single internet portal.
The Commission is concerned that the Council text is over-cautious in safeguarding
the interests of data providers, and will therefore be ineffective in removing the
obstacles to data sharing and providing public access to it.
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