10th Technical assessment of information on the implementation of Council Directive 91/271/EEC
Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD) 10th implementation report (status as at 2016) assessing the situation of each of the EU Member State and the overview situation at European level. Implementation of Structured Implementation and Information Framework (SIIF) for the case of the UWWTD with a standardised visualisation platform showing the results on 28 countries websites and a European aggregating website.
Under the Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive, the 28 European Member States have to report every two years the detailed situation as regards implementation of the Directive. In 2012, the European Commission has developed a concept of Structured Information and Implementation Framework (SIIF) to ensure the production and the online dissemination of information allowing the citizens to know the status of implementation of the Directive. For the DG environment, OIEau has developed a prototype UWWTD SIIF platform and then implemented in a pilot phase the platform for seven countries. The open source platform (a set of softwares combined to gather treat and visualise the data reported by countries which forms a standalone software package) can be re used by any country willing to visualize its wastewater data with graphs, maps, summary tables and online access to all this (see presentations). The platform received an international award from the Open Geospatial Consortium - OGC in category best practices in public administration and data visualization (see award and video). In 2016 the platform was extended to all EU member states and used to assess the situation of the 9th reporting.
The Commission also launches regularly infringement procedures, with in a first step, a letter of formal notice (LFN). At each stage of the infringement procedure, the member state sends updated technical information on the compliance situation as part of their reply. Overall, in the reply, a large amount of technical information on the compliance situation (agglomerations, treatment plants, etc.) is sent to the Commission, which have to be analysed and understood to assess the updated situation.
The current project has two key objectives:
- Technical support to assess the legal compliance of each member state, regarding their implementation of the UWWTD Directive, in 2016. ,
- Assessment of replies to legal requests by the Commission to Member States that have failed to comply with their obligations under Directive 91/271/EEC
OIEau has conducted the assessment of the data reported under Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive (UWWTD 91/271/EEC) in the 10th reporting exercise for the year 2016 for article 15 (detailed information by agglomeration and treatment plant) and for article 17 (investment programme) for all European countries and EU overview (see the 10th European UWWTD implementation report). This has been done with an extensive use of UWWTD websites developed, maintained and enhanced during the course of the project: see uwwtd.eu
The UWWTD SIIF platforms gives access to European overview and one website for each country. The websites provide country overview, summary statistics with tables and graphs, including historical summary view (from the statistics page), but also access to all agglomerations and treatment plants with each a summary fiche and its historical view. Various entry points are possible: via dots on maps, via simple search or filtered search, data can be exported, linked, printed, and web services allow to insert the data or a specific sub-part on an other website. The filters implemented on some pages are linked to the information of the page, allowing specific tables and graphs to be automatically created and customised to filters (ex: agglomerations >10.000p.e.).
It includes also functions accessible to registered users to produce summary register: a set of calculations, graphs and summary tables which form the basis of the national assessment report.
During the course of the project, a set of steps have been followed:
The first step was a rough assessment of the reported data, which have been imported on the platform, quality checked and the compliance has been automatically calculated. A document was prepared with these findings, allowing to interact with each Member State to check first findings and allow resubmission in case of needs.
The second step was a drafting of the member state chapter, part of the annexe to the technical assessment. A significant revision of the structure and content was conducted for this report. The chapter includes now a wide number of tables and graphs and the size has been greatly increased from 7-9 pages to more than 30 pages for each member state.
The final step was the use of all national assessments to produce the EU overview and the complete technical assessment. A great effort has also been made to clarify the key concepts and present an overview of the situation with 15 tables and almost 40 figures. The report has been published in June 2020.
The project has heavily relied on the SIIF websites which now include three to four reporting. The websites have been published in October 2019 after all final checks and validations with countries and the European Commission. A specific work was conducted this year to improve the visualisation of historical data, with a set of new tables and graphs. It is now possible to visualise for each agglomeration and treatment plant the reported data for the last 3 years summarised in some historical tables and graphs.
The platforms are used by a wide set of users to visualise the situation in their country, or extract or link the fiches to their own information.
To increase the use of the assessment results, specific summarised country factsheets have also been prepared. They use the results of the UWWTD assessment but also Water Framework Directive last reporting and the results of the recent OECD study on investment needs.