bill howarth, university of kent, iwrm regulation 1 university college cork - law and the...
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Bill Howarth, University of Kent, IWRM Regulation
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University College Cork - Law and the Environment 2015
Informed Decision-Making for Environmental Law, Policy and Regulation
Integrated Water Resources Management Regulation
William Howarth, University of Kent, [email protected]
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2. Summary
• - Consider the globally endorsed objective of integrated water resources management
• - Integration of water resources management and accommodating competing water uses
• - Responses to natural water insecurity threats (shortage and excess) and the need to work with nature so far as possible
• - ‘Naturalisation’ as an imperative for water resources management and the need for laws to reflect this imperative
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3. Environment and Development
• The UN ‘Earth Summit’ 1992 established 'sustainable development' as the overall imperative for the environment and development.
• "Development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”
• This requires a forward-looking balance to be drawn between environmental, social and economic factors
• Environmental policy principles (precaution, prevention and making polluters pay) may be seen as 'guiding principles' towards sustainable development
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4/1. Global Aim for Water Management
• In relation to water management, there is another guiding principle: the idea of integrated water resources management (IWRM).
• Chapter 18 of Agenda 21: • ‘The widespread scarcity, gradual destruction
and aggravated pollution of freshwater resources in many world regions, along with the progressive encroachment of incompatible activities, demand integrated water resources planning and management’.
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4/2. Global Aim for Water Management
• “IWRM is a process which promotes the co-ordinated development and management of water, land and related resources, in order to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems.”
• Global Water Partnership – Technical Advisory Committee, Integrated Water Resources Management (2000)
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5. IWRM
• The underlying idea of IWRM: that aggregate benefits (economic, social and ecological) will be greatest where the degree of integration of water management is greatest
• IWRM remains the dominant global idea in water resources management
• UN Water Report, The Status Report on the Application of Integrated Approaches to Water Resources Management (2012)
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6. Regulatory Integration in IWRM
• ‘Water resources management’ encompasses a range of sub-disciplines and activities including law, which provides an institutional and normative framework to support other water management activities
• IWRM suggests that the best system of water regulation is where there is the greatest coordination between laws relating to all aspects of water management
• IWRM suggests either codification or the greatest possible coordination of water laws
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7. Integration of Water Regulation in the UK
• A search under "water" in Legislation.gov.uk, produces 40 hits under public general acts of primary legislation and "more than 200 results" in respect of secondary legislation
• The law relating to water is spread amongst a large number of statutes enacted to address a wide spectrum of diverse water management issues
• To the extent that codification is taken as a measure of regulatory integration, the UK seems to be a model of regulatory disintegration so far as water legislation is concerned!
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8. Integration of Water Regulation in the EU
• Article 11 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union provides for integration of environmental protection requirements in Union policies and activities
• The Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) sought to achieve sustainable management of water and integration with other EU policy areas but stopped far short of a codification of water legislation
• With some relatively minor exceptions, the Directive may fairly be seen as a water quality Directive, with only incident relevance to matters of water quantity.
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9/1. European Commission Blueprint
• European Commission communication, A Blueprint to Safeguard Europe’s Water Resources (COM (2012) 673)
• calls for greater integration with legislation concerned with industrial emissions, chemicals, pesticides and pharmaceutical products;
• meeting challenges in respect of water efficiency and integration with flood and drought risk management;
• and the need to link the Directive with measures under the Common Agriculture Policy and other policies.
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9/2. European Commission Blueprint
• In summary, integration of water legislation does not seem to have been a concern to national legislators and where it has been a recognised as an objective needing to be pursued (at EU level) it does not seem to have progressed satisfactorily.
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10. The Feasibility of IWRM
• Traditionally, water regulation was adopted for utilitarian reasons.
• Increasing, the ‘intrinsic value’ of the water environment and the ecosystems and species that it supports have been recognised.
• The challenge of integration is about reaching an accommodation between radically different legislative purposes.
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11. Competing Water Uses
• Contrasts may be drawn between regulation of 'consumptive' and non-consumptive water uses, according to the extent to which water is returned to the source of supply after use.
• Different users may be seen as competitors for a finite natural resource, and a key element in water management may be seen as allocating priorities between competing water uses
• The suggestion that water management should be ‘integrated’ sheds little light upon how prioritisation of uses should be undertaken
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12. Water as a Friend or Foe?
• Human ambivalence towards water needs to be recognised
• Contrast legislation which seeks to protect water from human activities (such as pollution and over-abstraction) and legislation which seeks to protect humans from water-related threats (as where water is in excess or deficit)
• Water legislation illustrates a curious dichotomy between hydro-filial and hydro-phobic regulatory purposes.
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13. Increasing Water Insecurity
• The threat posed by water insecurity has become an increasingly important water management concern due, in part, to greater abnormality in hydrological conditions.
• This may reflect greater natural variability in weather events or may be attributable to human-caused climate change but, whichever, extreme water conditions are becoming less exceptional.
• Over recent years, hydro-phobic legislative concerns in water management seem to be gaining ground against hydro-filial.
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14/1. Regulatory Responses to Water Insecurity
• A national legislative response to the threat of water deficit, is the establishment of requirements for water resource management planning (under s.62 Water Act 2003, but with plans only recently adopted)
• This requires the preparation by private water supply companies, of plans to show how water supply obligations will be met over a 25-year period, indicating demand reduction and supply enhancement measures for that purpose
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14/2. Regulatory Responses to Water Insecurity
• On the threat of water excess, the Flood and Water Management Act 2010 introduces a risk-based approach to flooding and coastal erosion, recognising that reducing a risk at one location may involve increasing a risk elsewhere
• The new emphasis upon ‘flood risk management’ signals an important shift of emphasis from the former concept of ‘flood defence’, recognising the inevitability of flooding, so that the new aim should be to minimise the harm to which this gives rise
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15. Common Features of Water Security Legislation
• Legislative initiatives concerning extremes of water quantity are directed towards the common end of reducing the threat of water insecurity.
• This involves an anticipatory style of risk management regulation in respect of inherently unpredictable natural events, requiring actions that will minimise their worst impacts should the risks materialise.
• Legislative developments indicate a shift towards a ‘naturalisation’ approach in recognising that ever greater infrastructure provision (flood defence embankments and water supply reservoirs) may not be the most sustainable long-term option
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16. Water Security, Infrastructure and Naturalisation
• Although people have an insatiable appetite for 'security' against any kind of threat, provision of water security has a financial and environmental cost which limits its supply.
• Floods and droughts prompt a comparable kind of anticipatory legal response involving an increasing preference for ‘natural’ solutions
• 'Naturalisation' involves meeting human water needs and avoiding water threats in a way which involves the minimum disruption of, or intrusion upon, the natural state of the water environment
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17. Scope for Greater Naturalisation
• The 'naturalisation' approach could be pursued further in shifting resources from building and/or maintaining unsustainable defences to restoring floodplains to allow capacity for benign flooding
• More could be done to shift the balance from supply enhancement towards demand management through adoption of progressively ambitious water consumption reduction targets, and use of measures such as compulsory metering and more stringent abstraction controls to prevent ecologically damage
• The (politically less palatable) aspect of furthering naturalisation in the directions that have been suggested is the recognition that that development and land use must take place within environmental limits.
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18. Concluding Observations• The legislative recognition that water
management needs to work within natural ecological limits may be illustrative of a gaining of ground of a naturalisation approach.
• Despite its wide international endorsement, ‘integration’ is not a particularly helpful imperative for water management, in providing no indication as to how conflicts between competing claims to water use should be resolved.
• The issues presented in this discussion raise the question whether naturalisation, rather than integration, might serve as a better global imperative for water resources management.