GROUNDWATER STATUS ASSESSMENT IN CONTEXT OF REPORTING REQUIREMENTS TO THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION

Abstract

The accession of Poland to the European Union and implementation of the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/WE) into the Polish legal system has significantly changed the course and scope of national water management and assessment of water resources. The concept of integrated and dynamic way of treating groundwater and surface waters and their position in the environment, emphasized in the WFD, has strengthened and enhanced the already applied procedures for groundwater monitoring and status assessment. These procedures aim at achieving sensibly justified and well-founded balance between environmental objectives defined for groundwater bo¬dies and water needs required by all types of water users. This required establishment of a new, holistic methods for assessing groundwater body status based on previous national experiences and new EU guidelines and requirements. The new methods for assessing groundwater body status in terms of its quality and quantity were developed and implemented by the Polish Geological Institute – National Research Institute in 2013. The project was commissioned by the Chief Inspectorate for Environmental Protection and financed by the National Fund for Environmental Protection and Water Management. The methods accounts groundwater needs of priority water users through nine classification tests which investigate groundwater characteristics and dependencies between groundwater and its receptors, including surface waters and groundwater-dependent terrestrial ecosystems. Each of nine classification tests can result in either good or poor status and the final groundwater body status assessment is a product of all tests, which means that a negative result of at least one test can decide of poor status of a given groundwater body.