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4.3      Implementation of environmental policies

The European Union has adopted several environmental legislations and regulations which requires tackling agricultural pressures on the water environment to achieve their objectives (Chapter 1). Each legislation has its own intervention logic and instruments, which together form a complex but comprehensive policy framework to tackle nutrient and chemical pollution, water abstraction and hydromorphological alterations from agriculture.

The WFD has been a key driver in the definition and implementation of measures tackling agricultural pressures. Under the WFD, RBMPs are the main instrument to support the reaching of good status in all of Europe’s surface water and groundwater. RBMPs provide a comprehensive planning approach to identify agricultural pressures and present an integrated set of measures, optimising the use of existing mandatory measures required by other EU legislation, and selecting supplementary measures to meet good status. Recent evaluations of RBMPs show that many measures have been adopted to tackle agricultural pressures from diffuse pollution, water abstraction and hydromorphological modifications (EC, 2019a).

The following sub-chapters focuses on the implementation of existing EU environmental policies, including recent ones under key instruments of the EU Green Deal. The enforcement of environmental policies are reinforced by sectoral policies, in particular the instruments under the Common Agricultural Polices. These are presented in Chapter 4.4.

4.3.1        Tackling diffuse pollution

Nutrient diffuse pollution from nitrates and phosphorous is the main reported pressure from agriculture followed by chemical pollution from pesticides; other pollutants include sediments, microbiological/bacteriological and other pollutants such as vetenriary products (Chapter 3.1). However, diffuse pollution has been notoriously difficult to address due to the number of actors (farmers) to involve in order to have a noticeable impact on water quality.