To allow Europeans to make an informed choice about which beach to visit,
the European Union (EU) publishes an annual report on the quality of coastal and freshwater bathing areas, as reported by EU Member States. Since 2009 the European Environment Agency (EEA) and its European Topic Centre on Water have prepared the report in cooperation with the European Commission Directorate-General for the Environment.
Each year millions of Europeans spend their weekends at their local beach or visit Europe’s hugely diverse and beautiful beaches and bathing areas. Naturally, they have a keen interest in the quality of the bathing waters. The European Environment Agency (EEA) and the European Commission are therefore pleased to present this year’s bathing water report, which will help Europeans make informed choices about the bathing sites they visit. The report assesses bathing water quality in all 27 EU Member States in 2009, thereby also indicating where the best quality bathing is likely to be found this year.
The overall message in the report is that in 2009, 95.6 % of Europe’s coastal bathing waters and 89.4 % of inland bathing waters met the minimum water quality standards set by the European Bathing Water Directive. This is consistent with the pattern of the last decade when bathing water quality in Europe has largely remained high. Between 2008 and 2009 there was a slight deterioration in the number of bathing waters meeting minimum standards, with reductions of 0.7 % for coastal sites and 2.6 % for inland bathing waters. While such fluctuations are not unusual by the standards of recent years, they remind us of the need for continuing efforts to ensure that the quality of bathing waters is constantly maintained and improved.
This report also illustrates how you as an interested citizen can access more information about bathing waters than ever before. In addition to the annual bathing water report, online tools now let you access data for a selected country or region and make comparisons with previous years. Geospatial mapping programs also allow users to visualise data in new ways. Such tools help respond to the demand for reliable local information, which has grown rapidly in recent years.
Citizens also share a sincere interest in the quality of the marine environment and inland waters more generally. Efforts to improve the quality of bathing waters should therefore not be seen in isolation but in the context of the good ecological and environmental status we aim for in implementing the Water and Marine Framework Directives.
The European Environment Agency would like to encourage readers to make full use of all the information sources presented in the publication. They also encourage you to get more actively involved in protecting the environment and helping to improve Europe’s bathing areas.
The first European bathing water legislation, the ‘Bathing Water Directive’ (2) was adopted in 1975 and came into force in 1976. Its main objectives are to safeguard public health and protect the aquatic environment in coastal and inland areas from pollution.
New European legislation on bathing water was adopted in 2006 (3). The ‘New Bathing Water Directive’ updates the measures of the 1975 legislation and simplifies its management and surveillance methods. It also provides for a more proactive approach to informing the public on water quality and creates four quality categories for bathing waters — ‘poor’, ‘sufficient’, ‘good’ and ‘excellent’. The classification of bathing water quality is determined on the basis of a three- or four-year trend instead of a single year’s result, as was the case for the Bathing Water Directive. Therefore, the procedure for assessing quality classes of bathing waters under the New Bathing Water Directive gives more reliable and realistic results than the assessment under the Bathing Water Directive.
The classification under the New Bathing Water Directive is also less susceptible to bad weather or one-off incidents. Heavy rain or similar exceptional situations may cause pollution problems for a few days. In such situations authorities have to introduce immediate measures to lower health risk to bathers.
The New Bathing Water Directive is based on scientific knowledge on protecting health and the environment, as well as environmental management experience. It lays down provisions for more sophisticated monitoring, assessment and classification of bathing water quality. It also provides for better and earlier public information about bathing water quality and public participation, as well as for comprehensive and modern management measures. It requires bathing water profiles to be drawn up describing bathing waters and potential impacts and threats to water quality. These serve both as information for citizens and as a management tool for the responsible authorities, and enable grouping of bathing waters.
The results presented in this report are based on sampling carried out by the authorities in all EU Member States reporting under the Bathing Water Directive or the New Bathing Water Directive.
Bathing Water Directive
The results of sampling are checked against a set of physical, chemical and microbiological parameters. These include testing for the presence of coliform bacteria normally found in faeces and other sources, the colour of the water, residues of petrol-based mineral oils, foam from detergents and toxic acids such as phenol. Other tests can be conducted to verify the presence of salmonella or the acidity (pH) of the bathing water.
Using the results of the sampling for five parameters (total coliforms, faecal coliforms, mineral oils, surface-active substances and phenols) the bathing waters are then classified into the following categories:
• those that comply with the mandatory values;
• those that comply with the more stringent guide values;
• those that do not comply with the mandatory values;
• those that are banned or closed (temporarily or throughout the bathing season).
New Bathing Water Directive (2006/7/EC)
The New Bathing Water Directive reduces the number of key microbiological parameters to two: intestinal enterococci and Escherichia coli. These are the most robust and relevant microbiological indicators for human health. The sampling is complemented by visual inspection to identify, for example, algae bloom and oil.
Using the monitoring results of the sampling for Escherichia coli and intestinal enterococci, the inland and coastal bathing waters are then classified into the following categories:
• those that have excellent quality;
• those that have good quality;
• those that have sufficient quality;
• those that have poor quality;
• those that are closed temporarily or throughout the bathing season;
• those that are new (not yet classification possible);
• those where changes occur that affect the classification of a bathing water (meaning that classification is not yet possible after the changes).
The present report presents the 2009 bathing season results and the trends in bathing water quality.
Of the more than 20 000 bathing areas monitored throughout the European Union, two-thirds are in coastal waters and the rest in rivers and lakes. The largest number of coastal bathing waters can be found in Italy, Greece, France, Spain and Denmark, while Germany and France have the highest number of inland bathing waters.
The countries where the highest percentage of bathing waters met the guide values are Greece (99.8 %) (11), Cyprus (99.1 %), France (95.7 %), Malta (93.1 %), Bulgaria (90.3 %) and Portugal (90 %). Countries where more than 80 % of bathing waters meet guide values are Finland (88.5 %), Spain (84 %), Italy (83.5 %), Ireland (82.4 %), Germany (81.2 %) and Sweden (80.6 %).
Pollution takes many forms. For recreational activities, such as swimming, faecal contamination from sewage makes water aesthetically unpleasant and unsafe. Twenty to forty years ago, large quantities of largely uncontrolled, untreated or partially treated municipal and industrial wastewater was being discharged into many of Europe’s waters. Thankfully, due to EU and national water policies and actions to reduce pollution and treat wastewater, Europe’s bathing waters are today much cleaner.
Clean unpolluted water is essential for our ecosystems and economic activities such as tourism. Plants and animals react to changes in their environment caused by changes in water quality. We need to manage our water resources well to sustain human and economic development and improving the essential functions of our water ecosystems. The solutions lie in more integrated and sustainable water resource management, including full implementation of the Water Framework Directive, with its objective that all water bodies should have achieved ‘good status’ by 2015.
Source: European Environment Agency
