1 Water Resource Protection Issues in Relation to Contaminated Land Dominique Darmendrail and Bob Harris Abstract European countries are facing significant contamination of groundwater resources caused by former industrial activities. Nevertheless, European countries have different legislative and technical approaches to the problems of groundwater protection and land contamination. Some of these different approaches are based on differences in legislation; some are based on the differing local perspectives on the importance of groundwater. Four important issues have been identified: • regulatory approaches (technical and procedural) between water resources and con- taminated land; • the influence of the Water Framework Directive in groundwater and contaminated land remediation; • the point of compliance for both protection and remediation of groundwater resources (at the water table, the site boundary or the receptor); • the acceptance of natural attenuation in remediation. Similarities and differences will be outlined in this paper. Keywords: contaminated land, groundwater, pollution, remediation, natural attenuation, regulation, Europe INTRODUCTION Although technical specialists (such as hydrogeolo- gists, hydrologists and soil scientists) speak a common language and share a common understanding of the sci- ence of the subsurface environment, European coun- tries have different legislative and procedural approaches to the problems of groundwater protection and remediation of groundwater contamination. Some of these are based on the differences in legislation in different countries, some on the differing local perspec- tives on the importance of groundwater; some consider groundwater and soil together – in either protective or remedial measures, others consider them separately. These differences can hinder discussion in international fora as participants may have different concepts about the issues and therefore it can often be difficult to come to any consensus because of this lack of understanding. The Working Group 3 of CLARINET (Contaminated Land and its impact on Water Resources) therefore set out to try and get a little more common understanding of each others issues by seeing how much difference there really is, and how much commonality. At the same time we wanted to tease out the really important issues. The work builds on a study carried out for the Danish Environmental Protection Agency in prepara- tion for the 4th meeting of the Ad Hoc International Working Group on Contaminated Land in Copenhagen (June 1999). Questionnaires were sent to all CLARINET partici- pants about many aspects of water resources manage- ment, groundwater protection and remediation. We were interested in understanding the main reasons behind any differences in the various countries’ approaches. The use of a case study approach to bring out the details in a more practical way was considered but time and resources were against us producing any- thing of detail. We were also aware of the ConSoil 2000 Case Study 1 which covered in some part the legislative background and the groundwater issues. So a very lim- ited conceptual model was used at a late stage to bring out some differences between where we establish the Authors Dominique Darmendrail, BRGM Environnement et Procédés, 3 avenue Claude GUILLEMIN, 45060 Orléans cedex 2, France. E-mail : d.darmendrail@brgm.fr Bob Harris, National Groundwater and Contaminated Land Centre, The Environment Agency, Olton Court, 10 Warwick Road, Olton, Solihull B92 7HX. E-Mail: bob.harris@environment-agency.gov.uk