2026 Euromines highlights

Environmental Omnibus (VIII)

As part of its simplification efforts, the European Commission published a proposal for an Environmental Omnibus (Omnibus VIII) in December 2025, which includes proposals to streamline the IED (COM(2025)986) and to speed up environmental assessments (COM(2025)984). The ex-post consultation that ran from 12 March was the opportunity for Euromines to support the initiative and to provide further concrete amendments. More specifically, improvements can be made in the proposal on the speeding up of environmental assessments regarding the streamlining of project modernisation and decarbonisation, substantial preclusion, legal certainty, administrative efficiency, and the Birds Directive derogation gap.

The EP ENVI draft report on speeding up of environmental assessments, released on 22 May, is built on 3 principles: technology and sector neutrality, adaptive timelines, and digitalisation. A central element is the removal of provisions on strategic industrial projects, arguing that the strategic sector designation creates a 2-tier system, undermines coherence, and lacks a legal definition. The EP ENVI draft, which does not consider Euromines' proposals, reduces competent authority deadlines for screening and environmental assessments and replaces fixed COM deadlines with project-specific timelines set by the competent authority on a case-by-case basis.

The EP deadline to table amendments is on 23 June, the indicative EP ENVI vote is planned on 1 October and indicative EP plenary vote on 19 October. The Council expects its general approach to be finalised in October. The Irish Presidency wants to finalise the file by December 2026.

Water Policy

The file related to the Protection of groundwater against pollution and environmental quality standards in the field of water policy (linked to the Water Framework Directive - WFD) reached a conclusion. The Directive amending the WFD, Groundwater Directive and EQS Directive was published in the Official Journal of the EU on 20 April and entered into force on 10 May 2026. Member States must transpose the Directive at national level by 21 December 2027. The outcome was disappointing for the mining sector, as not only did policymakers miss an opportunity to tackle serious issues hampering the permitting of mining operations, but they also strengthened the "non-deterioration" definition and introduced 2 limited derogations - ineffective at the scale of mining operations.

Shortly after, following up on announcements in December 2025 in the REsourceEU Action Plan and the proposed Environmental Omnibus, the Commission released its WFD Guidance on 22 May. However, despite its positive ambitions, this new document fell short and confirms Euromines' issues with the WFD.

In parallel, the European Commission opened a call for evidence on 17 March, in order to support a review and targeted revision of the WFD (also announced in December 2025). The targeted revision should ensure it continues to contribute to water resilience as outlined in the Water Resilience Strategy, while supporting the EU's strategic autonomy in relation to critical raw materials. Euromines' input supports the initiative, advocating for a material-neutral approach, pragmatic definitions, and workable and predictable derogation pathways.

The Commission is expected to release its proposal for the targeted WFD revision in Q3/Q4 2026.

Stress-test of the Birds and Habitats Directives (BHDs)

The Environmental Omnibus Communication of December 2025 also announced that the Commission would stress-test the BHDs in 2026, taking into account climate change, food security, competitiveness, resilience, the evolving case-law and need for legal certainty and other developments and present guidelines to facilitate implementation including with regard to predative species. The objective is to assess whether the BHDs remain relevant, proportionate, and fit to achieve their objectives in a cost-efficient way. The stress-test aims at updating the 2017 fitness check of the BHDs, with 3 main topics in scope: application of Article 6 of the Habitats Directive (focus on the appropriate assessment procedure for Natura 2000 sites); policy coherence, stakeholder participation, funding support and governance; and species protection and derogations. The Commission will also focus on updating the annexes for scientific and technical progress.

Preliminary findings show that the stress-test and potential subsequent revision of the BHDs could be an opportunity to address challenges faced by the mining sector in terms of operations and permitting processes.

The Commission opened a public consultation running until 4 August.

Industrial Emissions Directive (IED) 2.0

Almost 2 years after the publication of the revised IED (15 July 2024), several aspects of the revision are still a work in progress, and the consequences of the new text are not all fully defined yet. While Member States are tasked to transpose the new IED by 1 July 2026, the Commission is committed to delivering several implementing acts and decisions.

After several consultations carried out in 2025 and 2026, the Commission has still not released any of the promised outputs. During and following the Article 13 Forum meeting that took place on 2-3 March 2026, Euromines provided feedback on the Commission's first draft on the method for assessing compliance with permit ELVs for emissions to air and water, and on the second draft BREF guidance - including joint papers together with other industry associations. Industry considers that the proposal on compliance assessment is premature as it contains technical errors and limitations, and risks creating conflicts with EN standards (European Norms). It is advised putting the work on hold while CEN works on EN 14181, to allow for the development of a technically sound method to account for measurement uncertainty. While the second draft of the guidance for the drafting of Best Available Techniques Reference Documents (BREF guidance) presented notable improvements, several issues still required work to uphold the quality, efficiency and transparency of the BREF process.

MIN BREF

During the first half of 2026, the Metal Mining BREF Technical Working Group (MIN BREF TWG) finalised the drafting of the questionnaire that was then used to perform the data collection among the 52 well-performing sites identified by EU-BRITE. The data collection phase ran from 6 March until 15 June.

After an unsuccessful attempt to identify Key Environmental Issues (KEIs) for process chemicals beginning of 2026, the MIN BREF TWG subgroup on chemicals reconvened on 10 June with the aim to identify the criteria that should be applied when assessing which chemicals should be KEIs. The work is to be continued with a new proposal from EU-BRITE to the subgroup.

The third round of MIN BREF site visits took place in Finland on 26-27 May and led the TWG to the Terrafame mine and Sotkamo Silver mine. Representatives from European Commission (EU-BRITE, DG ENV), ECHA, Member States (AT, EL, ES, FI, SE, NO) and industry (Euromines) took part in the tour.

As for the next steps, the data assessment phase will run until the end of 2026. In parallel, the MIN BREF TWG will agree on the criteria to apply in order to identify chemical KEIs and will identify those KEIs during the data assessment workshop scheduled in Autumn. The first MIN BREF draft is expected to be released in Q1 2027.