Europe - UNEP

Port of Kiev, capital city of Ukraine, on the Dnieper River. Photo credit: Shliahov, via Wikimedia Commons.
Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and
Slovakia had an established a practice of
collecting and storing huge amounts of water
monitoring data, the countries did not translate
the data into useful, policy relevant information
(UNECE 2003). Therefore, following the
adoption of the 1992 Helsinki Convention, the
UNECE developed guidelines for monitoring the
quality of transboundary waters. These guidelines
were revised in 1999, and adopted by the
meeting of the parties at the convention in March
2000 (UNECE, 2000b). In 2000 and 2003
respectively, the UNECE also supplemented the
guidelines on transboundary rivers with
additional guidelines relating to transboundary
groundwater and lakes. However, as noted
above, in some Eastern European countries there
remains a general lack of monitoring of water
quality and quantity.
An example of a project that supports the
implementation of the 1992 Helsinki Convention,
and more particularly the provisions relating to
the joint assessment of water quality, is the 2002–
2004 EU Tacis Project (supported by the UNECE)
that focused on the Pripyat, a major tributary of
the Dnieper River. More specifically, the project
involved the monitoring of four international
rivers, the Kura (Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan and
Armenia), the Seversky-Donetz (Ukraine, Russia),
and the Tobol (Kazakhstan, Russia). Attention had
also been paid to ensuring that the guidelines of
this project were consistent with the 2000 EU
WFD. Key objectives of the project included
demonstrating the application of the UNECE
guidelines on monitoring and assessment;
promoting and assisting monitoring services in
Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Russia,
Kazakhstan, and Belarus; evaluating and
recommending improvements to the guidelines;
training managerial and technical staff on
modern systems for monitoring and assessing
water quality; and developing competent local
experts to produce draft river basin plans for the
Pripyat River.
Provisions related to monitoring are also
contained in the 2000 EU WFD, wherein member
countries must establish programmes for
monitoring the status of surface water and
groundwater within each river basin district. The
monitoring information required for both surface
water and groundwater is contained in Article V
of the directive. EU member countries developed
a common methodology for the monitoring of EU
waters (EU, 2004).
54 — Hydropolitical Vulnerability and Resilience along International Waters: Europe