In 2018, the European Commission will publish its report on the assessment of the second RBMPs and will start the process of evaluating the WFD (EC, 2017a). To accompany and inform this process, the EEA has produced this report on the state of Europe's water. In addition, the Water Information System for Europe (WISE) Freshwater visualisation tool presents more, and more detailed, results.

The European Environment Agency's European Topic Centre on Inland, Coastal and Marine waters (ETC-ICM) aims to support the assessment, development, and implementation of EU policies through data analysis, data monitoring, and scientific knowledge sharing. European Topic Centres are important instruments of the European Environment Agency to monitor the environment in its member countries and analyse the current as well as the future state of the environment.