1.3 Structure of report

Section 2 recaps the key findings of the 2018 EEA assessment of status and pressures of European waters. The results of the 2018 assessment have been updated to include reporting information from more countries (28 Member States plus Norway) compared to those assessed in 2018. Section 2 thus presents an updated summary of the information published by the EEA in 2018 (which was based on 25 Member States).

Section 3 presents the drivers and pressures of selected European key water management challenges giving an overview of each issue in Europe, the main impacts on water ecosystems and key measures available to tackle the issue. Section 3 also briefly explains how the European key water management challenges have been selected and the information used to describe them (based on the WFD reporting and other sources of information on sectors, activities, and impacts).

In section 4, the report discusses certain cross-cutting issues of EU-wide relevance to measures implementation for addressing European key water management challenges. These cross-cutting challenges address:

1. the coherence of EU policies and their management responses to reduce pressures in the water environment,
2. the coherence of sectoral strategies with water policy objectives,
3. the funding of measures and
4. the role of multi-benefit measures.