Assessing policies and guidelines for drinking water quality

Abstract

Provision of safe drinking-water continues to be a challenge worldwide, under pressure from climate variability, new contaminants, population growth, and deteriorating infrastructure. This article evaluates and compares regulations on drinking-water quality in some selected Latin American countries, the regional regulatory schemes, and the European Union (EU), taking Germany as an EU member state example. A document-based, qualitative, and normative–analytical approach was used to examine uniformly regulated health-related parameters across jurisdictions in official standards (January–March 2025). The results show a near-global convergence on the requirement to test drinking water for the absence of Escherichia coli, highlighting its dominant role as an indicator of fecal contamination. In contrast, there remains considerable variation in regulatory treatment of total coliforms, disinfectant residuals, and chemical contaminants such as fluoride, nitrate, arsenic, lead, and microcystin. The EU and German systems are more precautionary and flexible. This involves the application of risk-based Water Safety Plans and the promotion of increasingly more stringent values for substances considered to be high risk. By contrast, some regulations in Latin America allow for operational tolerances, are based on obsolete guidelines, or simply do not consider emerging pollutants. These differences are reflective of varying institutional, infrastructure, and enforcement. While the scope of de jure regulatory documents and certain parameters for analysis are limited, the findings indicate substantial governance gaps as well as nascent convergence trends. Drinking-water protection relies on evidence-informed regulatory reform, organizational capacity, and ongoing commitment of resources that extend beyond the official standards.