Programmes de mesures de la Directive Cadre sur l'eau : doit-on discriminer l'effort de dépollution ?

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD 2000) aims to reduce water pollution in Europe to levels which ideally satisfy both economic and ecological interests. To this end, the EU Member States must conduct cost-benefit analysis in order to establish both targets objectives and timelines for implementation set targets and deadlines. This challenging and ambitious Policy reinstates the issues about the pollution control cost and ecological profits assessments. Regarding costs, the discrimination of pollution abatement effort enables to minimize the total cost when the location of the emissions matters, whereas an uniform effort can reach the required pollution levels more flexibly. Therefore, the discrimination of the abatement effort can?t be justified unless it induces significant cost reduction. In this paper, the authors show that the efficiency gains due to a discrimination of pollution abatement efforts depend on the intensity of the ecological constraint, and on the polluters profile. These findings are important for the EU Commission, which is charged with assessing the estimates provided by the member states.