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The Water Framework Directive establishes a legal framework to protect and restore clean water in sufficient quantity across Europe. It introduces a number of generally agreed principle and concepts into a binding regulatory instrument. In particular, it provides for:

• Sustainable approach to manage an essential resource: It not only considers water as a valuable ecosystem, it also recognises the economy and human health depending on it.
• Holistic ecosystem protection: It ensures that the fresh and coastal water environment is to be protected in its entirety, meaning all rivers, lakes, transitional (estuaries), coastal and ground waters are covered.
• Ambitious objectives, flexible means: The achievement of “good status” by 2015 will ensure satisfying human needs, ecosystem functioning and biodiversity protection. These objectives are concrete, comparable and ambitious. At the same time, the Directive provides flexibility in achieving them in the most cost effective way and introduces a possibility for priority setting in the planning.
• Integration of planning: The planning process for the establishment of river basin management plans needs to be coordinated to ultimately achieve the WFD objectives.
• The right geographical scale: The natural area for water management is the river basin (catchment area). Since it cuts across administrative boundaries, water management requires close cooperation between all administrations and institutions involved. This is particularly challenging for transboundary and international rivers.
• Polluter pays principle: The introduction of water pricing policies with the element of cost recovery and the cost-effectiveness provisions are milestones in application of economic instruments for the benefit of the environment.
• Participatory processes: WFD ensures the active participation of all businesses, farmers and other stakeholders, environment NGOs and local communities in river basin management activities.
• Better regulation and streamlining: The WFD and its related directives (Groundwater Daughter Directive (2006/118/EC); Floods Directive COM(2006)15) repeal 12 directives from the 1970s and 1980s which created a well-intended but fragmented and burdensome regulatory system. The WFD creates synergies, increases protection and streamlines efforts.