The European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD) was adopted in 2000. The WFD takes an integrated approach of water management and the overall objective is to achieve "good water status" for all waters in Europe by 2015. In the following report we investigate how the WFD has been implemented in 11 countries in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR).
The aim here is to investigate the influence of the WFD implementation on the national spatial planning systems and to take a closer look at the relationship between spatial planning and water management. The investigated countries are Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. In addition, we have investigated whether, and how, WFD ideas are applied in three non EU Member States in the BSR; Belarus, Norway and the Russian Federation.