Brussels, 10/06/2010 (Agence Europe) - According to the annual report from the European Commission and the European Environment Agency (EEA) on bathing water quality, published on Thursday 10 June, 95.6% of coastal bathing areas and 90% of bathing sites in rivers and lakes (out of over 20,000 areas tested) complied to minimum standards in 2009. This rate is slightly down compared to last year, but it cannot be refuted that progress has been made over the past few years.
“Over the last 30 years, EU and national legislation has significantly improved the quality of Europe's bathing waters but our work does not end there”, Environment Commissioner Janez Potoènik said. “This report and national reports are very clear about the status of bathing waters”, said Peter Kristensen, of the EEA during a press conference. Last year, bathing waters were tested according to a number of physical, chemical and microbiological parameters. The report takes stock of the 2009 season but “if waters were declared of good quality last year, there is every chance that they will also be good this year”, Kristensen added. He also set out certain interactive tools allowing information from national reports to be completed (e.g. the “eye on Earth” system accessible on the EEA site). Citizens are also called upon to take part by making their own observations, he stressed.
Despite a slight deterioration in the quality of bathing water between 2008 and 2009, there is a medium-term tendency towards improvement. Of the 20,000 bathing areas monitored throughout the European Union in 2009, two thirds were on the coast and the rest were at rivers and lakes. Compliance with mandatory values (minimum quality requirements) at coastal sites increased from 80% in 1990 to 96% in 2009. For inland waters, the increase was even greater, rising from 52% to 90%.
Between 2008 and 2009, there was a slight deterioration in the number of bathing waters meeting minimum standards, with reductions of less than 1 percentage point for coastal sites and 3 percentage points for inland bathing waters. Compliance with the more stringent (but not binding) guide values between 2008 and 2009 increased by slightly less than 1 percentage point for coastal sites to reach 89% but decreased by less than 3 percentage points for inland waters to 71%. Such annual fluctuations are not unusual by the standards of recent years, a Commission press release points out.
A large number of bathing sites in Cyprus, France, Greece and Portugal complied with the stricter criteria in 2009. However, eight countries had a significant number of bathing sites that were not in line with the criteria. Logically, this was mainly the case in countries with a large total number of bathing sites, such as France (129 sites that did not comply, i.e. 3.9% of the total), Denmark (68, 5.6%), Italy (56, 1%), the Netherlands (46, 7.1%), Spain (15, 0.7%), the United Kingdom (14, 2.3%) and Belgium (11, 8.7%). Furthermore, 2% of the coastal bathing areas of the European Union were the subject of a ban in 2009. These areas are mostly in Italy (583 sites prohibited for bathing, i.e. 10.2% of the total bathing areas), as well as in Germany (20 or 0.9%), Portugal (9 or 1.7%), the Czech Republic (8 or 4.3%), Spain (7 or 0.3%) and Poland (6 or 1.9%). Although the quality of bathing water at inland sites was more variable, the large majority of these sites also complied wit h the guide values in Germany, Finland, France and Sweden.
Fourteen member states (Germany, Cyprus, Denmark, Spain, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Slovakia and Sweden) applied provisions of the new bathing water directive for testing carried out during the 2009 bathing season. The directive, which took effect in 2009 and which updates the previous directive, does not have to be fully applied until January 2015 at the latest. It places greater emphasis on informing the public about the quality of water in bathing areas. (A.B./transl.jl)