This post is part of the GNHRE Blog Symposium, The Unmaking of the European Green Deal.
Credit Thomas Berg
Suvi-Tuuli Puharinen (a, b, c)
a Senior researcher, Center for Climate Change, Energy and Environmental Law (CCEEL), University of Eastern Finland.
b Associate researcher, Centre for Environment, Economy and Energy, Brussels School of Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
c Researcher and leader of the legal task in the project GloWater – Global connections and collaborative solutions for sustainable water security (grant no. 365754), funded by the Strategic Research Council of Finland.
Water is a central component of any environmental policy agenda. Not only do freshwater resources sustain ecosystems and biodiversity, a sufficient quantity and quality of water and functioning water-related ecosystem services are necessary for economies and societies as well as for human life, security and health. As such, protecting both the quantity and quality of waters is of crucial importance for realising the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation and the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, as recognised under the United Nations. The EU’s waters have long been subject to significant stress, including chemical and nutrient pollution degrading their quality, overabstraction threatening their quantity and physical modifications – such as damming and water-level regulation – that are damaging to aquatic ecosystems and biological diversity. Climate change is intensifying these problems and their economic, social and human rights implications at an accelerating rate.
The EU has had in place ambitious water protection legislation since long before the Green Deal. Since its adoption in 2000, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) has steered national water policies towards achieving good ecological, chemical and quantitative status of all European waters. Yet, as will be shown here, the WFD has not been immune to the shifting political priorities from the environmentally ambitious Green Deal to its current unmaking in the name of competitiveness and simplification. The developments in EU water law also echo the broader and systemic constitutional issues of this shift identified under this GNHRE blog symposium.
The WFD – 26 Years of Protection Objectives but Lagging Implementation
The WFD sets two legal objectives for all surface waters and groundwaters in the EU: preventing their deterioration and achieving good status in them, originally by 2015. The objective to prevent deterioration – or in other words, the no-deterioration rule – is a concrete embodiment of the environmental non-regression principle that has been in force since the moment of adoption of the WFD. For achieving good status, the Directive allows the deadline for achieving good status to be extended, in principle until 2027, an option that has been utilised extensively by the EU Member States.
The WFD sets up a river basin management process, within which Member States should work to comply with the water protection objectives by taking the necessary measures to reduce human pressures identified to have an impact on waters. This is not a small task, since achieving the WFD’s objectives requires, at least, a systemic change in sectors like hydropower generation, significant changes in agricultural and forestry practices as well as novel legal solutions to deal with chemical pollution from various sources. As such, the WFD has always entailed an underlying conflict with interests related to land use, agriculture, various industrial sectors and renewable energy generation. Consequently, the legal nature of the Directive’s objectives and the strictness of obligations have been subject to longstanding ambiguity and debate. In practice, the implementation of measures has been slow in many Member States, and the success in halting deterioration and inducing improvement in the status of waters has remained limited across the EU.
The Court of Justice and Tightening Controls for New Projects
Against this background, between 2015 and 2022, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) delivered a series of judgments clarifying the legal nature of the WFD’s objectives in relation to the authorisation of new projects that could impact waters adversely. In 2015, the Court established that Member States are required to refuse authorisation for projects that are incompatible with the objectives of preventing deterioration and achieving good status. Through subsequent cases, the interpretation of prohibited deterioration was tightened to capture all trends of chemical deterioration in groundwaters, even if only detected in parts of groundwater bodies, as well as all temporary impacts. Member States nevertheless retain the option to authorise projects through the derogation in Article 4(7) WFD, provided that four cumulative conditions are met: all practicable steps are taken to mitigate adverse impacts; the reasons are set out in the river basin management plan; the project is of overriding public interest, or its benefits for human health, safety or sustainable development outweigh the benefits of achieving the objectives; and there is no significantly better environmental option. Until recently, the derogation could not be used for chemical pollution, as projects could not be authorised to cause waters to fall below good chemical status even by virtue of derogations. This limitation could concern various industrial and mining projects that entail releasing harmful substances to waters.
In practice, applying the Court’s case law in national permitting processes has led to refusing authorisations for new projects, including projects associated with the ‘green transition’. However, as illustrated for instance by the case of a bioproduct mill in Finland, the strictness of these controls directly depends on the status of the focal waters and how much progress has been made in the Directive’s implementation to resolve existing pressures. If the waters are already below good status or show risks of deteriorating due to existing industrial activities, it is less likely that new projects can be authorised without infringing the WFD. In turn, if the waters are well within good or high status, they exhibit more resilience towards new pressures without necessarily tipping into deterioration. In other words, robust implementation of the Directive would not only improve the status of waters but also build a more sustainable basis for new projects and renewing economic sectors that have impacts on water.
Water, the Green Deal and Its Unmaking
The European Green Deal marked an unprecedented rise in political and legislative efforts in response to several environmental challenges but its contribution to water protection was more of a mixed picture. While the need to achieve the WFD’s environmental objectives was recognised as central to both zero pollution and biodiversity, only a few actions were taken to reinforce the water acquis. The revision of the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive (UWWTD) and the introduction of an extended producer responsibility scheme requiring producers of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics to cover at least 80% of the costs of removing micropollutants from urban wastewater (quaternary treatment) marked key advances in combatting pollution. In connection with this initiative, the WFD was also revised with Directive (EU) 2026/805 to include thresholds for new substances in the chemical status objectives, which take effect in December 2027 and should be achieved by 2039. Regarding ecological objectives, the Nature Restoration Regulation introduced a new joint target for Member States to restore at least 25,000 km of free-flowing rivers by 2030 and binding legal obligations for peatland rewetting gradually by 2030, 2040 and 2050. Yet, the legal force of these obligations to transform key pressure sectors is arguably open to question as river restoration should focus on obsolete barriers and rewetting should be implemented on a voluntary basis with farmers and landowners.
At the same time, the Green Deal already sowed the first seeds for contesting water protection and neutralising the advances made through the CJEU’s case law. Adopted under the REPowerEU agenda, the revision of the Renewable Energy Directive included two legal mechanisms to dismantle the limitations that the WFD’s objectives pose for renewables deployment. The first one is the designation of renewables ‘acceleration areas’, where individual environmental impact assessments (EIA) and case-by-case scrutiny of the project’s compliance with the WFD are replaced by area-wide assessments and establishment of general measures, the adherence to which is deemed sufficient for compliance with the WFD. In essence, this undermines the requirements established in the CJEU case law, calling for careful assessment of each individual project against the status and vulnerabilities of the specific waters in which their impacts are felt. Second, the legislation established an a priori presumption of renewables projects being of overriding public interest in the context of derogating from the WFD’s objectives. As the recent opinion from Advocate General Rantos suggests, this does not necessarily mean an absolute priority that would be binding on derogation decisions. Nevertheless, this gives Member States a clear permission to authorise renewables deployment regardless of the impetus to improve water status and tilts the burden of proof on this condition, requiring Member States to justify cases where they would regard water protection to prevail over renewables deployment.
As this blog symposium notes, during the second mandate of the von der Leyen Commission, the push for dismantling the WFD has continued as part of the broader competitiveness and simplification agendas, initiated to track recommendations of the Draghi report on European competitiveness. This entails copying the ‘acceleration area’ mechanisms to other sectors. Such a mechanism is already in force for the so-called net-zero technology manufacturing projects under the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA) and similar mechanisms have been proposed for industrial manufacturing projects under the proposed Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) and data centres under the proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CAIDA). Both the NZIA and Critical Raw Materials Act also provide for Strategic Projects, which may be considered to be of overriding public interest for the purposes of the WFD’s derogations. Adoption of the IAA and CAIDA, together with the proposed Permitting Omnibus and its Annex I, would introduce similar designation to all energy-intensive decarbonisation projects and data centres. Comprehensive assessments of what these initiatives together would mean for the WFD and its objectives have so far been absent.
Moreover, the deregulatory ambitions do not stop here, as the Commission’s gaze has also turned to dismantling the WFD itself. Directive (EU) 2026/805 already amended the WFD in 2026, including the introduction of new exemptions (Articles 4(7a) and 4(7b)) to neutralise some of the CJEU’s interpretations entrenching the no-deterioration objective. Furthermore, in the context of its RESourceEU Action Plan, the Commission has announced an intention to carry out a ‘targeted revision’ of the WFD for simplification and addressing bottlenecks especially in the context of permitting critical raw materials projects. A Call for Evidence on the targeted revision was launched on 17 March 2026, some three months after the political decision to revise was announced. The process has, however, been challenged by environmental NGOs, who in September 2026 lodged a complaint with the European Ombudsman on alleged maladministration regarding the announced revision, including breaches of the procedural safeguards established in the Better Regulation Guidelines and the obligations of the Aarhus Convention requiring early and effective participation.
Conclusion: What will 2027 bring?
As exemplified by the variety of social and economic water risks that became apparent in Europe in summer 2026, water problems are getting harder to ignore. Indeed, water resilience and water security have been named among the political priorities of the Commission during its term of 2024–2029. As noted in the EU’s 2025 Water Resilience Strategy, achieving these depends on enhanced implementation of the EU water acquis, especially the WFD. Nevertheless, the concrete regulatory actions on water have so far focused on unmaking the legal obligations under the WFD gradually established by the CJEU. Some of the advances made under the Green Deal are also under threat of being dismantled. The extended producer responsibility system in the UWWTD has faced both an (unsuccessful) call for suspension by the European Parliament and several legal challenges, including an (unsuccessful) action for annulment by the industry and a still pending preliminary ruling request. In September 2026, Advocate General Kokott gave an opinion suggesting returning the scheme to legislative preparation in response to Poland’s action for annulment, which would open the door for new political deliberation on the fate of the system.
More fundamentally, the lack of assessments of cumulative effects of the deregulatory turn raises serious concerns about due process in these regulatory developments. In practical terms, these actions also do very little in terms of fixing the fundamental issue of the need to transform economic sectors to a more sustainable path and ensure that European waters are in good health to provide the basis for economies, societies, ecosystems and humans. Water illustrates concretely the challenges and systemic constitutional questions related to the unravelling of the EU Green Deal identified in this GNHRE blog symposium, including issues of legal certainty, legitimate expectations, non-regression in environmental protection, the rule of law and the Union’s compliance with its own international obligations, especially under environmental human rights law.
Overall, it appears that 2027 will be a crucial landmark for European water protection law. Apart from the targets for new chemicals that need to be complied with later, 2027 marks the final deadline for achieving good water status. However, in most Member States this objective is unlikely to be met in the majority of waters, and Member States have already indicated their intention to further postpone the achievement of the WFD’s objectives or even to lower the ambition level entirely through the application of other exemptions, most notably setting less stringent objectives under Article 4(5). A robust EU response to strengthen water protection would entail the Commission stepping up its enforcement actions and refraining from further weakening of the acquis. Yet, the continuing push for simplification and deregulation raises doubts about the EU’s commitment to water protection and casts a shadow on the future of the WFD.