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2) Approach to normalisation - use of country area weighting
Fig 1 uses country area weighting as a way to normalise the reported data. Country area weighting has some disadvantages (principally that if a country with a large area has a high exceedance rate in one year, that can influence the overall result) but this approach seems to be a reasonable way to normalise the results and be less prone to fluctuations owing to variability in numbers of reported data. We expect some noise in the data as the WISE 6 reporting adapts to this new indicator, but that this will settle down in a few years to provide a more consistent trend.
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The normalization of the exceedance rate to the country area makes sense, as it is about environmental protection and each square kilometer of EU territory should get the same weight for an EU-wide assessment of water body quality.
Comment from Germany, Federal State Saxonia:
The methodology introduces a weighting based on area proportions in order to reduce the effects of heterogeneous spatial and temporal data. This is intended to compensate for the temporal and spatial imbalances in the data of the individual countries. The formula proposed for this results in an indicator which relates the sum of the percentage shares of the exceedances to the land areas of the participating countries and the sum of the areas of these countries per year. Whether this approach actually brings an advantage in terms of compensating for data gaps is difficult to assess and certainly also depends on the type of data gaps. We would like to point out that the participating countries have very different percentages of agricultural land and percentages of arable land and permanent crops in the respective land area, in addition to the different density of measuring points and gaps in the data. Arable land and permanent crops represent the area category from which the emissions of pesticides usually originate. Since the measuring points mainly detect immissions emanating from arable land and permanent crops, a reference to this appears more conclusive than to the total area of the federal states.