Safe drinking water is vital for human health. Diffuse pollution of nitrogen and pesticides from agriculture is the main obstacle to meet drinking water quality targets.
The objective of FAIRWAY is
- to review approaches for protection of drinking water resources against pollution by pesticides and nitrate, and
- to identify and further develop innovative measures and governance approaches for a more effective drinking water protection.
Decision support tools workshop, March 2019
Over the last 6 months, nine FAIRWAY case study sites have been testing a number of decision support tools (DSTs) that are used in European countries to help farmers/policy makers/water companies promote good practices for reducing nitrate and pesticide pollution of surface water and groundwater.
The results were presented on 12 March 2019 at a successful workshop at Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark.
Some of our main findings are:
- Many similar DSTs exist for similar problems. Themes and ideas behind national DSTs can be exchanged between regions and countries.
- A DST cannot generally be exchanged between countries without adjustments because of local differences in the climate, farming systems and implementation of legislation etc.
- One DST for all European countries will not work.
The FAIRWAY network increases the collaboration, exchange of ideas and inspire to improvements and further development of DSTs. Please feel free to contact us if you need any further information (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)
Rikke Krogshave Laursen
FAIRWAY & WATER PROTECT Joint Conference
EU policies in addressing drinking water managment challenges
7 December 2018, Brussels
Venue: Permanent Representation of Slovenia in Brussels Brussels, Rue de Commerce 44 Brussels Belgium
Legal Policy & Governance WP Meeting, October 2018
Oslo 8-9 October 2018
On 8 and 9 October 2018, WP6-participants met in Oslo for a work package meeting. Two Danish participants were present through Skype. A total of 15 participants presented progress in each task and discussed the way forward in terms of activities, participating partners and a time line for the coming months. We kindly acknowledge the hospitality of our Norwegian partner NIVA who organized this meeting very well.
We discussed the preparation of phase 2 of the questionnaire of task 6.2 in more detail. This phase 2 will consist of a survey that will deliver the additional data to be used in most of the other tasks.
As key messages so far, we have identified the following:
- Regulatory structures at EU, National and Regional levels are very comprehensive and fragmented
- High degree of divergence in how Directives are transposed into national law
- Shades of former pre-EU legislative structures still exist (old issues continue)
- Diversity is not good or bad (both legislation and case studies), it is a reality we have to deal with
- Because of this complexity and diversity, it will be our challenge for the coming years to translate good examples of local government arrangements to other areas, and to advice the EC on further improvements of the regulatory structure at EU level to enable this
- Our data on governance originate from the case studies, this limits the scope of our conclusions (disclaimer).
Sandra Boekhold
