1 Introduction

Water is an essential resource for human health, food production, energy production, transport and nature. Securing sustainable management of water and of aquatic and water-dependent ecosystems and ensuring that enough high-quality water is available for all purposes, remains one of the key challenges of our time in Europe and is the main aim of EU water policy and of the European Green Deal.

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The European Green Deal adopted in the end of 2019 (EC 2019b) set a new milestone in European environmental policy and creates a framework for transitioning to a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy. Several goals and targets of the European Green Deal are relevant to water resources, for instance in terms of restoring ecosystems, reducing pollution from different sources and using resources more efficiently. At the same time, many actions are ongoing and further efforts needed across Europe to achieve the objective of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) in terms of achieving good status of all bodies of surface water and groundwater at the latest by 2027. In this context of existing but also new policies, European countries are called to address a number of key water management challenges, in particular related to the degradation of freshwater ecosystems, pollution from chemicals and nutrients as well as water abstraction and scarcity.

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