Bob Harris

Science-driven integrated river basin management: a mirage?

Abstract The European Union Water Framework Directive (WFD) represents a new approach to the management of water across Europe. As part of the implementation of the WFD, integrated, catchment-scale plans for the protection and restoration of aquatic ecosystems must be developed. These plans need to be supported by new science, focused on understanding the general modes of behaviour of complex aquatic ecosystems, and the fundamental principles that govern this behaviour. This requires the collaborative production of new scientific knowledge, drawing on expertise from multiple academic disciplines, and refocusing on larger spatial and longer temporal scales. To mobilise existing scientific knowledge, and to produce new knowledge that is effectively adopted in policy and practice, scientists and managers must also develop collaborative partnerships involving the co-production and bidirectional exchange of knowledge. However, many personal and institutional barriers currently limit the development of such partnerships. Particular issues surround individual willingness to step outside disciplinary comfort zones, and the role of professional norms, rewards and value systems. The lack of training and support for individual knowledge-brokers, who work to develop these partnerships at the interface between science and management, is also a limiting factor. Even with such collaborative partnerships in place between scientists, and between scientists and managers, scientific knowledge will only ever be one contributor to the decision-making processes occurring within the WFD. Scientific knowledge will compete alongside issues of personal and institutional values, of moral judgements, of equity and of social justice in the consensus-building processes occurring within decision-making fora. The potential for, and the limits of, scientific knowledge to support the implementation of the WFD should be clearly recognised.

Introduction: The Need for Risk-Informed River Basin Management

As the pressures from both anthropogenic and natural causes on environmental systems increase, it is no longer effective or efficient to deal with one issue at a time, since solving a singular problem often causes damaging impacts on other environmental compartments or in other places. We must consider the consequences of our actions on all parts of the environment in an integrated way and configure these actions to cope with an uncertain future. These challenges demand a different approach in order to achieve actual improvement of the ecological quality of our river basins and thus sustain the goods and services they provide for the well-being of society. Risk-informed management is this new approach. It involves the integrated application of three key principles: be well informed, manage adaptively and take a participatory approach. This chapter introduces this risk-informed management approach as it was developed in the European Commission funded project RISKBASE and provides an introduction to rest of this book where the key principles are explained and underpinned in detail.

Integrated River Basin Management and Risk Governance

Water management is currently in a sustainable development phase, where pressures like changes in water quantity, erosion and contamination are being seen to interact in a complex pattern. In this phase it is necessary to take a holistic, integrated approach to environmental issues in order to meet sustainable development aspirations. Risk-related management decisions are challenged by complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. Depending on the challenge, risk management must adapt to the specific circumstances and context. While simple risk problems can usually be addressed through routine-based procedures and measures (e.g. waste water treatment), complex risk situations (e.g. environmental quality of river basins) require new governance processes. These processes should be well informed, robust and participatory. Inspiring to this end is the risk governance framework developed by the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC). The use of the best available understanding on how river ecosystems function will resolve some of the complexity, reduce uncertainty and thus will improve river basin management. However, significant uncertainty will remain. This is intrinsic to the complexity of social/ecological systems. We need to accept and may learn to cope with this uncertainty by applying the concept of Adaptive Integrated Water Management (AWM). That AWM works in real-world practice is, for instance, demonstrated by how the Lonjsko Polje Nature Park (a floodplain area of the Sava River in Croatia) is managed to date. Risk-informed management incorporates all these elements as it involves the integrated application of the three key principles: be well informed, manage adaptively and take a participatory approach. The most appropriate scale for implementation of these key principles may be the catchment or landscape scale.

Synthesis and Recommendations Towards Risk-Informed River Basin Management

The health of river basins throughout the world is under pressure from economic activities and a changing climate. Water is necessary for life, agriculture and many industrial production processes. But water is also a receptor for our waste products. In Europe, diffuse pollution from agriculture and our industrial legacy, together with hydraulic engineering for navigation, water supply, hydroelectricity or flood control, is seen as the main factor adversely influencing the quality and ecology of European freshwaters and estuaries. Economic activities affect the chemical and ecological status of our rivers, lakes and groundwater and deplete available soil–sediment–water resources. The wide range of economic activities and the ecohydrological complexity of many river basins, in terms of the functioning of the soil–sediment–water system and the links between water quantity, quality and economic activities, make a more integrated management approach to river basins complex and challenging.

Framing the Uncertain Future: Articulating IPCC-SRES Scenarios for European River Basins

Downscaled articulations of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES) have been outlined qualitatively for a hypothetical Southern, Central and Northern European river basin and a time horizon set at 2030. The purpose was to survey the sensitivity of ecosystem state indicators, to assess which drivers would be within the grasp of river basin management and to make a geographic comparison. Expert workshop debates were structured using a sequence of entries on drivers and the wider geographic setting, on the river basin and its hydrology, on pressures and on a range of ecosystem state indicators. The workshop elaborated IPCC-SRES scenarios A1 (global economy) and B2 (regional communities) only, since these are generally considered to be the two most divergent scenarios. Contrasts between these two scenarios in land, resource and energy use as well as in the orientation towards sustainability in governance were thought to lead to distinct contrasts in water and sediment delivery to stream networks, in contaminant loads and their remobilisation and in opportunities for riparian biota to populate available habitat. Also, these contrasts between A1 and B2 are probably most profound in the North and South. In contrast to other scenario assessments in the literature, the workshop found it highly plausible that agricultural land use would expand in the North, notably on deeper soils that had been afforested in previous decades. For the South, uncertainty on the direction of land use change was profound, leading to quite different, sketchy but plausible trajectories. Workshop participants remained cautious in the use of scenarios, because it was felt that adoption of altered lifestyles, transition to a carbon-neutral energy system or a nutrient-balanced, low-external-input agriculture can be charted as scenario elements, but their wholesale assimilation in real societies over the coming decades remains hard to predict. Notably discharge variability was foreseen to be highly responsive to the different scenarios but is considered to be under the influence of a river manager. Major drivers, such as the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union and world market demand development for dairy or biofuel, will strongly affect land use and soil management. These appear to be largely outside the span of control of river basin authorities. The workshop hoped that risk preparedness in river management would include an identification of such major drivers outside their formal control and of the relevant institutions, both in different sectors and at different levels.

Chapter 1.5:Developing the Evidence Base for Integrated Catchment Management: Challenges and Opportunities

Water is a fundamental natural resource for humans and for all other organisms, but is under immense pressure from climate change, population growth, changing living standards and rising environmental expectations. Globally, water underpins many of the Millennium Development Goals set by the UN Gene...

Monitoring Programmes, Multiple Stress Analysis and Decision Support for River Basin Management

The identification of plausible causes for water body status deterioration will be much easier if it can build on available, reliable, extensive and comprehensive biogeochemical monitoring data (preferably aggregated in a database). A plausible identification of such causes is a prerequisite for well-informed decisions on which mitigation or remediation measures to take. In this chapter, first a rationale for an extended monitoring programme is provided; it is then compared to the one required by the Water Framework Directive (WFD). This proposal includes a list of relevant parameters that are needed for an integrated, a priori status assessment. Secondly, a few sophisticated statistical tools are described that subsequently allow for the estiation of the magnitude of impairment as well as the likely relative importance of different stressors in a multiple stressed environment. The advantages and restrictions of these rather complicated analytical methods are discussed. Finally, the use of Decision Support Systems (DSS) is advocated with regard to the specific WFD implementation requirements.