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New Approach to Groundwater Protection in Croatia According to the Requirements of EU Directives and Guidelines

By adopting the Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) in December 2000, the concept of managing the water resources in Europe has significantly been changed. The Directive stipulates that water resources should be managed in an integral way, at the level of river basins. Until 2015, all the countries members of the European Union must take maximal possible measures concerning their water resources in order to satisfy the standards prescribed by the Directive. However, within the discussions carried out while adjusting the final text of the Water Framework Directive, it turned out that in the EU member countries there were very different conceptual approaches to groundwater protection. For that particular reason in the final text of the Directive, in Article 17, the European Commission is requested to propose the special measures for the protection and control of groundwater pollution in the frame of the new Groundwater Directive. The new Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council (2006/118/EC) on the protection of groundwater against pollution and deterioration has been adopted on 12th December 2006, and its basic guideline is that by it the specific measures for fulfilling the objectives of environment protection in the part relating to the protection and control of groundwater pollution are determined. These measures are primarily related to the definition of common criteria and procedures for determining the chemical state of groundwater bodies based on the quality standards from other EU directives and concentration threshold values which can be determined at national level, at river basins level or at the level of groundwater bodies. The new Groundwater Directive also determines the common criteria for identification and change of the upward trends of the substances specified as pollutants, and in addition it prescribes measures for protecting or limiting the direct and indirect input of a pollutant in groundwater, respectively. According to the Water Framework Directive, the groundwater bodies must be identified as a drinking water protected areas in all the cases when being used for human consumption and provide more than 10 m3/day or when being used as a water supply for more than 50 people. At the same time it should also be pointed out that the Directive do not imposes the obligation of determining the zones of sanitary protection for well fields or captured springs. However, the guidelines for carrying out this Directive enable the EU member countries to, if they wish, carry out the protection measures within the zones of sanitary protection.

groundwater protection; Croatia; EU directives; threshold values; natural background concentrations of substances; drinking water protected areas

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