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Finally, the lack of robust governance on water stress at EU level has left ample space for discrepancies between Member States in interpretations, and drought policy has important limitations regarding compliance (Stein et al., 2016). For example, most Member States apply exemptions from registration or permitting for water abstractions considered to be “small”⁽[4]⁾ in volume. Overall, the accumulation of all these small abstractions over a large area could result in a significant pressure (e.g. for local groundwater bodies), which is disregarded. Similarly, in some areas, there are issues with over-allocation of water rights which were issued before the adoption of the WFD. Although the WFD has provided a significant motivation for local authorities to review the pre-existing water rights, and revise them according to the identified over-exploitation problems,  Member States usually have difficulties to intervene with permits that were granted a long time ago and the so-called “senior water rights”. As a result, most Member States have become stricter with issuing newer water permits (EC, 2020d; Buchanan et al., 2019).