La sfida della Direttiva Quadro Acqua dell’UE per la conservazione delle risorse idriche in Europa The challenge of EU Water Framework Directive for water resources preservation in Europe

Sustainable water resource management is a strategic objective of UE and represents a major challenge for developing countries, which socio-economic development in the next few years cannot be paid by environmental resource depletion and drastic decrease of ecosystem health. Monitoring aquatic ecosystems health is a basic requirement for the achievement of strong sustainability and constitutes a key issue of both UE institutions and scientific ecological community. UE Water Framework Directive summarized the ‘state of the art’ of aquatic ecosystem monitoring and asked for scientific and technological innovations. The crucial point is the development of more effective ecosystem health descriptors. Nowadays, standardized descriptors are mainly chemical ecosystem features, which may be not representative at all of health condition of ecological community and biological indices and indicators, which either have low sensitivity to stress or are conceptually restricted to specific application. An innovative approach to environmental policy, including ecological research as a component of economic plans, and a stronger connection of applied research to basic ecological theories, are required to address some of the major gaps existing in the actual knowledge on monitoring aquatic ecosystem health and to improve sustainability of water resource management both in WBC and in the UEC.