Outlook

Key messages

It is expected that water demand will grow and intersectoral competition will intensify over time in the EaP countries. This will persist within the national territories as well as between upstream and downstream water users in the transboundary river basins.

The European Green Deal will certainly change the overall approach to the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss in the coming years. In the EaP context, this call for action in various areas, such as the approximation of water laws to the EU WFD, institutional integration and development of sufficient expertise, as well as implementation of integrated and sustainable management of water resources. The current national policy dialogues under the EU Water Initiative are providing intersectoral and interagency platforms to discuss strategic planning and reforms in water sectors in the EaP countries.

With EU support, all EaP countries have harmonised their water quality data with the EU Water Information System (WISE – water quality) data dictionary. Data harmonisation should expand over other WISE components, such as water quantity, emissions and spatial data. This will enable comparable and interoperable data and information to be obtained at the region level which is crucially important for supporting EU water diplomacy in the region.

The EEA has provided substantial technical and expert support towards developing water information systems in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. These systems will facilitate data sharing across the water agencies as well as integration of water data at the national and local level. However, further maintenance and sustainability of the information systems must be ensured by the respective host institutions.

Data integration at the national and local scale present large gaps in the water area. Several national institutions host a number of thematic and small information systems. However, in many cases, these systems are operated in isolation with limited capacity to interact with other similar systems. Integration of those systems together with the database integration in line with SEIS principles would be beneficial for both practitioners and decision-makers.

The EaP countries benefited from European and Eionet expertise and experiences in developing water indicators in accordance with the EEA methodology. However, within the time frame of the ENI SEIS II East project, only a few selected indicators could be developed. Thematic coverage of the indicators needs to be expanded in the future to underpin knowledge-based policymaking in the area of water in the EaP countries.

There is still a need to further improve expert capacity in data processing and undertaking the relevant assessment. Stability within the pool of experts and ensuring the continuous development of expert capacity needs to be planned with a long-term perspective.

EU support has recently focused on strengthening monitoring programmes in the EaP countries. In that context, the EU Copernicus Programme has the potential to accelerate and support quick and up-to-date monitoring of various variables such as snowpack and land-use changes in the EaP countries. Developing the CORINE Land Cover Inventory for capital regions of the EaP countries has been initiated by the EU since 2016.

Implementation of the United Nations System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) for water in the EaP countries would provide essential inputs in the process of river basin characterisation and the implementation of water services (in line with EU WFD, Article 5).