Since the adoption of the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) in 2000, water management issues have been given an increasing attention at the BEF. It started in 2002 with a large stakeholder workshop on “River Basin Management and Ecological Water Quality - Links between the new Water Framework Directive and Nature Conservation” aiming at a joint discussion forum for water management and nature conservation experts to analyze instruments for the new water policy, taking into account ecological aspects and a new integrative management approach.
Later, the implementation schedule of the WFD has had a strong influence on the BEF programme. Additionally, the fact that the Baltic States are defined by the directive as one eco-region and that they share river basins has been the driving force behind co-operation and information exchange among the countries. Consequently, many expert groups have been established to cover issues such as characterization and classification of rivers and lakes, intercalibration sites for EU network, economic analyses of water resources, assignment of International River Basin Districts and monitoring of water quality.
As most of the rivers in the Baltics are transboundary, the assignment of the River Basin Districts is a complicated task. This means that the countries have to ensure full effort co-ordination throughout the whole basin and produce co-ordinated programmes of measures and management plans. Several meetings to facilitate this co-operation between Estonia and Latvia as well as Latvia and Lithuania have been conducted. They resulted in bilateral agreements on co-operation on transboundary rivers between those countries. The three environmental ministers signed corresponding agreements in October 2003. The BEF has assisted in arranging and facilitating the first working group meetings held in the frame of the bilateral agreements.
Continuing the tradition of the assistance projects the BEF team is caring out various projects related to the implementation of the Water Framework Directive. See more in the chapter on “Projects”.
