6. Conclusions

Clean bathing waters are vital for both public and environmental health. Bathing sites on seas, lakes and rivers are valuable spaces for people to exercise, relax and engage with nature. Clean bathing waters are thus important tourist attractions, often bringing jobs and money to local areas. Improving water quality at bathing waters through conservation and restoration often benefits the wider aquatic ecosystem by improving biodiversity habitats.

Seas, lakes and rivers are often the destination of the excesses of human activities – whether sewage, storm water overflows, plastics or chemicals – making their management complex and multi-faceted, particularly given climate change predictions for coming decades. In Europe, the Bathing Water Directive has been effective in helping to reverse decades of the degradation of the continent’s bathing waters. However, if bathing water management in Europe is to continue to have successful impacts, it needs to address emerging challenges using innovative and cooperative management approaches.

Five key issues for bathing water management in Europe

This report has outlined five main groups of issues affecting bathing water quality, each with its specific drivers and pressures, but sometimes addressed with the same (or similar) legislative or technical approach.

1. Microbiological pollution is the most obvious risk to human health. Even after decades of pollution management, elevated bacteria levels still affect at least 15% of European bathing waters that cannot reach ‘excellent’ quality classification according to the BWD, although they may be of acceptable (i.e. ‘sufficient’) quality for bathing. This pollution comes primarily from waste-water and sewage outflows, agricultural manure, or technical malfunctions in water infrastructure.

2. Extreme events – typically storms or low water levels – are gradually becoming more common causes of bathing water pollution in Europe as the result of climate change. In effect, they are similar to microbiological pollution in that they involve spillages from combined sewage outflows. Such spillages and overflows can contain a wide range of contaminants that reduce bathing water quality. Such events are increasingly well-reported, which may also be due to more strict management in the past decade.

3. Eutrophication of bathing waters – particularly common in lakes – results in a direct threat to bathers’ health. Excessive algae growth and decomposition can also create hypoxic conditions and poor water quality. Eutrophication is mainly caused by the run-off of nitrogen fertilisers and manure from agriculture, but it can also originate from household waste.

4. Cyanobacteria blooms are also a result of eutrophication, although result from a complex set of reasons working in synergy, and are of particular toxic risk to human health. They are most often reported from Central European lakes at the height of the summer season. Cyanobacteria blooms often have significant negative effects on aquatic life. Case studies show that management approaches should be well-studied and planned in advance, as some approaches can in turn cause further harm to ecological conditions of the aquatic environment.

5. Wild bathing is increasingly common across Europe, as adventurous swimmers look for new waters to swim in. Such ‘wild bathing’ has the potential to deepen engagement between people and the environment, but also raises new issues for water managers. At some unmonitored sites, water quality may not be high enough for safe bathing, whilst at others, the activities of swimmers might disrupt sensitive ecosystems. Adaptive management approaches with public communication at their core are necessary to support safe ‘wild bathing’ in the future.

 Successful water policy and management guided by the BWD

The multiple pressures acting on seas, rivers and lakes mean that water quality at many European bathing sites made swimming unsafe. At many sites – especially those in urban areas – bathing would have been unimaginable, indeed in 1991, more than a quarter of all identified EU bathing waters could not be declared of ‘sufficient’ quality for bathing.

European legislation on bathing water management has developed over past decades, centred around the Bathing Water Directive, which aims to address dynamic conditions and implement updated knowledge and technologies. The main focus of the BWD lies in the integrated management of bathing waters through interconnected water industry directives and measures that address the causes (such as reducing pollution) of different pressures as well as mitigating short- and long-term consequences (such as early warning systems).

This management approach has public participation at its core. As a direct result of these policies, water quality has improved significantly in Europe over the past two decades. In the past decade, more than 95% of European bathing waters have been of ‘sufficient’ quality for bathing, with the majority of these being classified as ‘excellent’. As a result, bathing is now possible in centres of many previously polluted European cities. Through a review of management approaches, this report has shown how the countries of the EU have made large improvements at a number of bathing sites, opened new ones, and prohibited bathing at the ones that did not achieve adequate water quality status. Consequently, the general condition of bathing waters in the EU is getting better from year to year. The case studies listed throughout the report highlight the specific management approaches that resulted in bathing water quality improvement. However, the small proportion of European bathing waters that are consistently of a quality too low for safe bathing shows that there will be an on-going need for sound management of bathing water quality.

Continuous efforts in applying existing management approaches alongside new innovative solutions that tackle emerging issues are necessary if the European bathing water policy and management is to remain a significant success story.

Innovative approaches to European water management

Over the decades, the array of approaches taken to improve bathing water quality has included various technical, information-sharing, educational, and innovative solutions, based on legislative requirements. For example, microbiological pollution issues seem to be best solved by involving various stakeholders (most notably the public that has an interest in using bathing waters. This process involves seeking both systemic and specific causes and addressing them with long-term policy, so that there would be as little need for coping with the consequences as possible.

It is, however, more difficult to predict the causes of extreme events resulting in acute short-term pollution events. Again, integrated and modern approaches should explore causes and address consequences of extreme events. Green areas in cities can function as storm-water retention basins and mitigate the load on conventional sewage systems. Such solutions are not only less expensive than traditional ‘concrete' infrastructure, but also provide a wide array of co-benefits for local economies, social communities as well as local economies (EEA, 2015a).

As it would be challenging to completely halt the causes of eutrophication, in-lake methods have proven to be effective. These include eutrophication control methods such as nutrient inactivation, lake level drawdown, covering bottom sediments, sediment removal (dredging), and harvesting.

Emerging issues for bathing water management in Europe

The final chapter of this report surveyed the challenges ahead for bathing water management in Europe. Most notably, there will be climatic changes in the future that will substantially affect bathing and its management. Higher demand for bathing will press national authorities to expand their bathing water networks, identify and monitor new bathing waters and ensure that supporting infrastructure is in place. Rises in sea water levels, altered and extreme river flows and floods, as well as rising air and water temperatures are likely to significantly affect bathing and its management in Europe. However, substantial regional differences are expected in all these processes. Among the issues already present, floods and short-term pollution events are likely to increase, making water managers compete with other water users such as agriculture and industry in order to ensure adequate bathing water quantity and quality during such events.

But these changing conditions are not only likely to accentuate current issues, they are also likely to introduce new issues, such as accelerating the growth rate of new pathogens that were not problematic until now. Management under these new conditions will need to be informed, responsive and agile, and based on available data and well-understood technologies, in order to avoid harm from unforeseen side effects.

An emerging problem in Europe is marine litter, which can be found even in wild bathing destinations.  Litter, plastics in particular, is accumulating in our seas and coasts. Plastic pollution threatens the health of marine species and humans. In addition to its environmental impacts, marine litter creates a major economic loss for the coastal economies.

A good example of unexpected risks is the COVID-19 virus and pandemic. The fast spread of the virus around the world was an unexpected development, which also affected bathing in Europe. The European Union must continue to work for a resilient, sustainable and healthy bathing practice, to overcome emerging risks. And the European Union should continuously implement the hygiene measures at the bathing sites, such as social distancing and hand cleaning.

There are more than 21 000 bathing waters in the EU, covering diverse environments, landscapes and cultures, and subject to a variety of issues and policies. However, the overall quality of bathing waters and their management has been supported by decades of strong European bathing water policy. The Bathing Water Directive has achieved a high share of ‘good’ and ‘excellent’ quality bathing waters, which comprise 92.5% of the EU’s bathing water inventory. As this ‘deep dive’ into the issues surrounding bathing water management in Europe has outlined, the BWD has created a strong framework for managing and mitigating emerging challenges in the years to come.