Over the past few years, managing water scarcity and drought has become a priority for European water managers and decision-makers, reflecting the risks of lacking resilience to climate change and unsustainable water management practices. At the same time, progress in reducing the significant abstraction pressures on European water bodies has been limited, raising severe concerns about insufficient ambition, enforcement and investment to achieve sustainable water management and good status of water bodies by 2027 as required by the European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD).

The European Green Deal and the EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change recognise the need for further action in the field of quantitative water management and include priority actions to stimulate and foster resilience and sustainability. Under a new contract for the European Commission, Ecologic Institute is contributing to a study on water quantity management in Europe and supports the work of the task group on Water Scarcity and Droughts of the Common Implementation Strategy (CIS) of the WFD.

The main expected result of the project is the provision of timely, high quality and effective support to the Commission in the framework of the CIS process on water quantity management, including:

• Elaborating a best practice report of measures implemented to achieve ecological flow and define actions in support of enhanced implementation of ecological flow and water balances
• Analysing the use of water efficiency targets in the river basin management planning
• Updating CIS Guidance 24 on river basin management in a changing climate
• Assessing the costs and benefits of nature based solutions for flood risk management
• Elaborating a summary and best practice report on the use of allocation mechanisms

Ecologic Institute's role:

Ecologic Institute contributes through two major project tasks:

• Water allocation mechanisms: Ecologic Institute will lead this task, carrying out an overall assessment of water allocation mechanisms and best practices.
• Ecological flow and water balances: Ecologic Institute will contribute to this task on regulatory set-up for implementation of ecological flows, specific issues of implementation linked to hydromorphology and BQEs, best practices related to hydropower sector.