Ecological status in a changing climate
An ECOSTAT workshop discussion paper
Ecological assessment under the Water Framework Directive has been ongoing for over 20 years. Climate change poses a threat to aquatic systems in Europe but also to the established approaches and methods used to assess them. This report arose from a workshop to review the current impact of climate change on status assessments, with a focus on use cases in Member States. The principle objective was to explore potential approaches to dealing with climate change in ecological assessment. Climate change was found to be influencing the ecological assessment of many aquatic systems. However, at the workshop, Member States adopted a cautious approach focused on a critical dichotomy: whether observed changes are temporary and avoidable through additional measures, or permanent and unavoidable, potentially necessitating a reassignment of water body typology or updated reference conditions. There was agreement that sufficient evidence and certainty should be a pre-requisite to implementing changes to maintain the integrity of assessment time-series and stakeholder confidence. Key recommendations include monitoring climate-relevant parameters, expanding the reference site networks to track long-term trends, and ensuring that measures to tackle other pressures (e.g., nutrients, abstraction) are exhausted before adjusting classification systems. Recording the degree of ecosystem change driven by climate change should be part of future frameworks to track changing sensitivity, resilience and ecosystem service loss in Europe.
FREE Gary;
VARKITZI Ioanna;
O'HARE Matthew;
HANDIBODE Siofra;
LYCHE SOLHEIM Anne;
BUSSETTINI M;
BROOKE Jan;
BISSETT Nicola;
CAMELO Leonardo;
JEANNOT Benjamin;
ARLE Jens;
KAGALOU Ifigenia;
SHAHMIRZADI Schahrsad;
THRANE Jan-Erik;
TSIAOUSSI Vasiliki;
STRAKA Michal;
BEDĚRKOVÁ Ivana;
SVENSSON Jonas;
RUTJES Carlo;
HETTE-TRONQUART Nicolas;
MAGAND Claire;
PÁL Boda;
VAN DE BUND Wouter;
2026-03-12
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC146177
978-92-68-38158-8 (online),
1831-9424 (online),
EUR 40655,
OP KJ-01-26-120-EN-N (online),
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC146177,
10.2760/0061155 (online),
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