The European Commission has set itself the ambition to tackle the risks of climate change and environmentally related challenges in the new European Green Deal. The Deal acts as a roadmap to transform Europe into resource efficient, competitive economy. Greenhouse gases emissions will be net zero, economic growth will be decoupled from resources use and no person should be left behind.
One of the programmes under the Green Deal is the Zero Pollution strategy. This includes Clean Water to preserve biodiversity in lakes, rivers, wetlands and coastal waters, reduce pollution from agriculture and urban areas, and reduce harmful pollution from chemicals, pharmaceuticals, pathogens and micro-plastics. The recent fitness checks of the European Water Directives has shown that the Directives are largely fit for purpose, but it also gave evidence that there is still room for improvement on chemicals in water.
Finally, the recent approval of the Water Reuse Regulation by the European Parliament will enable increase water reuse, which will affect pollution pathways. Within this context, the Water Europe Working Groups on Urban Water Pollution, Contaminants of Emerging Concern, and Bathing Waters took the initiative to develop a White Paper to contribute to the development of European policies and the research and innovation agenda of the European Commission.
For this White Paper, your inputs are needed and therefore a short questionnaire has been created that will help the WGs to shape the contents of the document. Your input is requested before 15 August 2020. Afterwards a first draft of the White Paper will be developed and presented at the Water Knowledge Europe 2020 event, happening in autumn this year.
It won’t take more than 15 minutes of your time. Join the online survey here.
