Abstract
Just recently, on June 4, 2008, the Parliament, Council and Commission, have met a second agreement to specify the former Council proposal of 21 June 2007 for amending WFD (Water Framework Directive), which suggested that Member States may opt to apply environmental quality standards (EQS) for sediment and/or biota instead of those for water (Forstner 2007). The agreed compromise text of Amendment D, Recital 13 (new text passage in bold) reads “Furthermore, Member States should be able to establish EQS for sediment and/or biota at national level and apply those EQS instead of the EQS for water set out in this Directive. Such EQS should be established through a transparent procedure involving notifications to the Commission and other Member States so as to ensure a level of protection equivalent to the EQS for water set up at Community level. The Commission should summarise these notifications in its reports on the implementation of Directive 2000/60/EC. Moreover, sediment and biota remain important matrices for the monitoring of certain substances with significant accumulation potential. In order to assess long-term impacts of anthropogenic activity and trends, Member States should take measures, subject to Article 4 of Directive 2000/60/EC, with the aim of ensuring that existing levels of contamination in biota and sediments will not significantly increase”. This commentary has two objectives: (1) the status of the WFD–sediment relationship, and (2) the treatment of sediment issues by river basin communities that form the central institutions to promote the development of RBMPs (river basin management plans), including the program of measures, in their respective river basins. Examples of publications on river basis management in this journal are: Owens (2005), Owens and Petticrew (2006), Panagopoulos et al. (2007), Quevauviller (2006a, b; 2007), Salomons (2008), Schwartz et al. (2006).
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