National Guidelines for Groundwater Quality Trend and Trend Reversal Assessment: Overview and Procedures Implementation

The identification, monitoring and assessment of potentially damaging trends in groundwater quality and need to implement any necessary measures to reverse them are integral requirements of the Water Framework Directive (WFD, 2000/60/EC) and the Groundwater Directive (GWD, 2006/118/EC). The WFD and GWD require that pollutant concentrations trends in groundwater are identified and assessed to determine whether they are environmentally significant. Where significant upward trends exist, they should be reversed through the application of programmes of measures to ensure that there will not be future failures of environmental objectives of the groundwater body. Following the Decree of the Italian Ministry of the Environment of 6th July 2016 that modifies the Annex 1 of the Legislative Decree no. 152/2006, the Water Research Institute of CNR and ISPRA, together with the National System for Environmental Protection, were appointed to draft a guidance for assessing upward trends and their reversal. In this framework, a national guideline for trend and trend reversal assessment has been written by the authors and released by the Ministry of the Environment on July 2017 (Guerra et al., 2017). In this paper, these guidelines and a practical implantation on a groundwater body (GWB) in Emilia-Romagna (Po Plain, Northern Italy) are presented.