The EC Water Framework Directive mandates that good ecological status should be reached in all water bodies in Europe by 2015. To this end, according to Article 11 of the Directive, programmes of measures shall be established for all river basins. The selection and combination of measures within these programmes should also take account of cost-effectiveness considerations. In an article for the Journal gwf Wasser / Abwasser, Benjamin Görlach, Nicole Kranz and Eduard Interwies present a possible methodology for this selection process, which was developed by Ecologic for the German Federal Environment Agency. On the whole, economic analyses are well established routine in water management.

However, the selection and combination of measures under the Water Framework Directive introduces some novelties within this process. For example, it is not single measures that should be tested for their cost-effectiveness, but instead combinations of measures. In addition, the effectiveness of different measures is no longer analysed for individual parameters only (such as P or N), but instead for a whole set of parameters, which together constitute the good ecological status. This includes in particular the morphology and the ecological quality of water bodies. Finally, efficiency of measures is not only required at the local level, but also at the level of the river basin or river basin district.

For the process of selecting measures, Ecologic and the Institute of Water Resources Research and Management at the University of Kassel developed a handbook, as part of a research project commissioned by the German Federal Environment Agency. The handbook proposes a seven-step approach for the selection of measures, which constituted the first attempt in any European country to design the selection of cost-effective combinations of measures in a practicable and transparent way. The article in the journal gwf Wasser / Abwasser briefly presents the methodology.

Further information on the underlying project and the handbook itself can be found on the project website “Cost-effective sets of measures in the Water Framework Directive”.