The directive imposes different reporting obligations (Situation report according to Article 16 and implementation programme according to Article 17). The data presented in the UWWTD Waterbase pertains to Articles 15 and 17 of the Directive, which stipulates that discharges from urban waste water treatment plants and amounts and composition of sludges disposed to surface waters must be monitored to verify the compliance with specific provisions of the Directive.

Some technical insight and familiarity with the terms and contexts used for the implementation of the UWWTD is required to make use of the tables.

By linking the information in the tables on agglomerations, UWWTPs, discharge points and receiving areas it is possible to obtain a complete picture showing what type of treatment is applied to treat waste water generated in specific agglomeration, what is the character of the area (e.g. water body) receiving discharges from waste water treatment plans or collecting systems without treatment.

The content of the table with additional data can be used for further quantitative analyses on emissions from UWWTPs with different types of treatment and various size categories. A QA-document describes a flagging of some of the provided data according to certain criteria. These flags should be considered by the user for specific purposes.

All the tables from Waterbase can be downloaded for use by all stakeholders according to below Rights. Lists and explanation of codes can also be shown and downloaded from Additional information - Code Lists. Link to further details on reporting guidelines is given from below Reporting Obligations.

This dataset includes the reported agglomerations which are displayed on the UWWTD maps ( https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/water/european-waters/water-use-and-environmental-pressures/uwwtd/interactive-maps/urban-waste-water-treatment-maps-3). The active agglomerations with correct coordinates in the reported data were selected from the source European UWWTD tabular dataset, which is available on the download link https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/waterbase-uwwtd-urban-waste-water-treatment-directive-9 .

The definition of the UWWTD Agglomerations dataset attributes (fields) is available on the link https://dd.eionet.europa.eu/datasets/latest/UWWTDArt15/tables/Agglomerations

The internal dataset which includes the inactive agglomerations as well is reported under UWWTD data call 2021 - INTERNAL VERSION, Sep. 2024" ( https://sdi.eea.europa.eu/catalogue/inspire-pds/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/e9f6b0d4-cd31-4490-8637-93f45585f9a4).