This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The quality of European rivers has improved in recent years, but not at the pace required to meet the environmental targets set for 2030. This is one of the main conclusions of a study led by researchers María Pachés Giner and Remedios Martínez from the Institute of Water and Environmental Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), published in Environmental Science and Pollution Research.
An analysis of data from 2015 to 2021 shows that organic pollution decreased in 14 of the 18 countries studied, while phosphate concentrations fell in 11 of the 16 countries for which sufficient information was available. However, these improvements alone do not guarantee that the targets set for the end of this decade will be met. Although seven countries are currently in a favorable position, only Slovenia is on a trajectory fully compatible with the 2030 environmental targets.
Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Italy and Denmark also received a positive assessment. Still, the observed trends indicate that they will need to maintain or strengthen their management policies to sustain levels considered sustainable. "The results show that it is not enough simply to know the current state of rivers.
It is also essential to analyze how quickly their quality is improving and to check whether that pace will enable the targets set for 2030 to be met," explains Pachés, lead author of the study. At the other end of the scale are Belgium, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Romania, Sweden and Spain, which face some of the greatest challenges. Spain and Bulgaria present the most critical situations, as they combine high levels of pollution with unfavorable trends in some of the indicators studied.
In Spain, the analysis reveals that although the organic pollution load has fallen, it remains high, and phosphate concentrations increased from 2015 to 2021. "This trend takes us further away from the 2030 environmental targets and highlights the need to strengthen measures aimed at controlling nutrient inputs into river ecosystems," says Martínez, a researcher at IIAMA-UPV. To obtain these results, the team developed the Human Pressure on River Ecosystems (HPRE) indicator.
This new methodology transforms data available from Eurostat into a comparable scale ranging from 0 to 100. The indicator combines biochemical oxygen demand, linked to organic pollution, and phosphate concentration, associated with nutrient inputs and eutrophication processes. In addition to determining the situation in each country, it enables calculation of its progress and the rate of improvement required to achieve sustainable levels by 2030.
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