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Which actions are required?

• Renewed or continued efforts must be made by EU Member States to develop Drought Management Plans (DMPs), based on long-term strategies for pro-active water management, and making the transition from crisis management to risk management.
• The data collection and information flows must be further refined and tailored to the spatial and temporal scale at which water stress makes itself felt, capitalizing on the results of current innovation programmes and lessons learned in sectors where decoupling is already being accomplished, such as the manufacturing sector. Based on this, a renewed analysis of the future water stress at EU scale is called for.
• A key factor contributing to the effectiveness of the EU water directives in progressing towards their objectives are the (binding) cross-references to the Water Framework Directive’s objectives in other EU policies. Sectoral policy interventions must not only work in synergy with water policies but also actively support them.
• Impacts of water stress are felt at local and regional scale, while the drivers act from regional to global scale. Connection of these levels of analysis requires operationalised nexus approaches and systemic thinking. A practical first step is to foster projects with ecosystem service approaches and nature-based solutions in drought management, because these approaches inherently accommodate such thinking.