Memorandum submitted by The Natural Step
THE ISSUES
This document deals with issues raised by the
way in which transposition of the Directive is being handled.
Key points about the purpose of the Directive itself are that:
— we have to think in a systems context,
within which all elements of the water cycle are connected;
— the achievement of Good Ecological
Status is a stated goal, to be achieved by whatever Programme
of Measures is necessary to ensure that high status;
— sustainable use of catchments and
the water environment are key objectives; and
— in the context of a systems perspective
of the water cycle the catchment is the logical management unit,
and relevant pressures and actions have to be set in that context.
This differs from the bulk of the current UK
legislative base and regulatory mechanisms, which are by majority
single-discipline focused. Innovation is required in the transposition
of the Directive into UK legislation, policy and practice; an
assumption that what we have in place already is sufficient is
not adequate for the purposes of the Directive.
THE OPPORTUNITY
The transposition of the EU Water Framework
Directive (WFD) into domestic legislation provides a unique opportunity
to redress the trend of degradation of riverine systems, and of
their ecosystem functions upon which society depends. The opportunities
are great, but so too the risk of inelegant or ineffective transposition.
Government intent to translate the Directive into UK legislation
in as cost-neutral a manner as possible is acceptable only as
long as cost controls do not blind the vision of the Directive,
for example by presenting the existing UK approach to water management
as already fully satisfactory.
REQUIREMENTS OF
THE DIRECTIVE
The first preamble of the Directive states that,
"Water is not a commercial product like any other but, rather,
a heritage which must be protected, defended and treated as such."
The five purposes of the WFD (see Box 1) are given teeth by designation
of river basins defined in Article 2(13) as ". . . the area
of land from which all surface run-off flows through a sequence
of streams, rivers and, possibly, lakes to a particular point
in a water course (normally a lake or river confluence)".
The Directive's requirement for Integrated River Basin Management
(IRBM) recognises the need to treat river basins as dynamic land-water
systems, including all interconnected watercourses, water bodies,
groundwaters and land up to the watershed. It requires that ecological
problems are addressed in an integrated cross-disciplinary fashion,
linking water quality, water quantity, physical and other parameters
within the management process.
Box 1: The Five Purposes of the WFD (Article 1)
1. The prevention of further deterioration
and the protection and enhancement of the status of aquatic ecosystems.
2. The promotion of sustainable water use.
3. The enhanced protection and improvement
of the aquatic environment.
4. The progressive reduction of pollution
of groundwater.
5. The mitigation of the effects of floods
and droughts.
The WFD's explicit objective is achieving Good
Ecological Status (defined by Article 2(21) and the involved provisions
of Annex V), assessed with reference to Biological Elements (aquatic
flora, fish and benthic invertebrates) and a number of hydrological,
physical and chemical measures.
The WFD requires characterisation of river basins
and description of sites, allowing comparison over time and from
place to place, and identification of pressures upon them. Once
pressures have been identified, Article 11 places an obligation
on Member States to establish a Programme of Measures by which
they will attain Good Ecological Status. Sub-articles (3) and
(4) concentrate on Basic Measures (which may be legislation, statutory
Codes of Practice, etc.) and Supplementary Measures (including
voluntary agreements and non-statutory Codes of Practice) respectively.
Examples include measures to prevent significant losses of pollutants
from technical installations and controls over abstraction, and
these range from economic or fiscal instruments to demand management
measures, educational projects, and recreation and restoration
of wetland areas. There is a mop up provision of "other relevant
measures", providing huge scope for innovative thinking about
protection of the environment.
BALANCING CONTROLS
ON POINT
AND DIFFUSE
WATER POLLUTION
Traditional management of UK catchments has
tended to address issues as localised problems. Legislation and
investment in water quality has driven considerable effort and
investment in the control of point sources, which are identifiable,
quantifiable, and amenable to control by an authorisation or consenting
process. However, pollution arising today from diffuse sources
may equal or exceed the impact of point sources. A wide range
of pollutants arise from diffuse sources including plant nutrients,
pesticides and herbicides, grit, dust and hydrocarbons, all especially
abundant in the first flush of run-off after rainfall. By their
very nature, they are harder to quantify and identify, vary from
place to place, and are more difficult to control than point sources.
Britain's preoccupation with point source control
may contain some inequities. For many UK catchments, the bulk
of population and economic activity occurs downstream, though
upstream changes in land use, construction work and development
can significantly affect environmental quality at catchment scale.
Industries lower in the catchment often suffer a "double
whammy". They are required to invest disproportionately in
control of point sources of effluent (easy targets for regulatory
control) to compensate for the lower dilution potential of poorer
quality receiving waters, often resulting from diffuse pollution
upstream, then may need to invest in increasingly sophisticated
and energy-intensive treatment to clean up water abstracted for
industrial, agricultural or potable uses, passing these costs
on to customers. (Catchments with a high risk of Cryptosporidium
or pesticide contamination resulting from poor agricultural practices
provide a graphic example.) Flows may also be less predictable
where the "buffering" effect of wetlands have been lost
upstream. It is surprising that no-one to date has cried "foul",
now especially since Article 9 of the WFD states that Member States
must take account of the principle of recovery of costs of water
services ". . . including environmental and resource costs".
Article 10 of the WFD is titled "The combined
approach for point and diffuse sources", and requires Member
States to manage diffuse impacts and environmental practices to
control those impacts. Preamble (40) states that, "Community
water policy should be based on a combined approach using control
of pollution at source through the setting of emission limit values
and of environmental quality standards." The Directive challenges
us to use different measures to protect our watercourses. Preamble
(38) highlights economic instruments as one tool which ".
. . may be appropriate". Coincidentally, the UK Government
has recently published Tuning Water Taking, its response to the
consultation on the use of economic instruments to control water
resources. The WFD explicitly requires redress to the historic
imbalance between point and diffuse inputs, as well as other causes
of ecological degradation. If we are to honour the spirit and
vision of the Directive, we require a new relationship with the
water environment and, unavoidably, with the land as well.
Significant advancement of Good Ecological Status
can be achieved through tackling loads of diffuse sources. Eliminating
problems at source needs to replace "end-of-pipe" solutions.
We already have at our disposal a range of appropriate source
control techniques (improving fertiliser application and cultivation,
porous surfaces for roads, sustainable drainage system (SuDS)
technologies, pollutant phase-out at source, etc) that are amenable
to application as Basic Measures. However, a DETR (now DEFRA)
consultation paper in March 20011 states, "The existing legislative
framework and the associated secondary legislation already provide
many of the powers that will be needed . . . The working assumption
is that secondary legislation will be prepared using existing
regulation making powers . . ." There are also suggestions
of a presumption by UK Government about reserving Basic Measures
to control point source discharges, leaving diffuse pollution
control to the less forceful Supplementary Measures. Any assumption
about the appropriateness of existing UK regulations would lead
to no change from today's unsustainable status quo, and a rejection
of the essence of the Directive. We should not assume that today's
UK approach needs no revision. Both Basic Measures and Supplementary
Measures need to be applied to controlling diffuse pollution,
habitat degradation, and the host of other challenges to the Good
Ecological Status of our waters.
We have to be prepared to invest in a truly
sustainable future, recognising water as a vital resource that
should be managed for the good of the population and the environment.
Indeed, it is difficult to conceive of a more pragmatic form of
investment in a genuinely sustainable future than the quality
of the water environment, which "pays back" to society
in terms of its supportive capacities. In addition to benefits,
there will be costs, though these may be more in innovations in
multidisciplinary thinking than in hard economics.
LAND USE
AS A
COMPONENT OF
LIVING CATCHMENTS
Efficient functioning of catchments depends
upon the intimate linkage of land and water. Insensitive land
use contributes to many of the problems afflicting aquatic resources
today. If we are seriously to address the objectives of the WFD,
we have to "join up" thinking on reform of water legislation
with agricultural, urban and other land use policies.
This problem is thrown into the spotlight when
considering upper and middle catchments in rural areas. Inappropriate
farming and other land use remote from river channels—for
example inappropriately-sited pig-rearing, over-grazing and trampling
by excessive sheep, maize growth, insensitive land drainage or
military exercises—can cause disproportionate damage to
the ecological status of watercourses. Serious chemical problems
arise from sheep dip, sedimentation, eutrophication, pesticide
runoff, and organic pollutants. Further degradation of ecological
status by physical means, including the smothering of stream beds
(with subsequent loss of invertebrates and water plants) by eroded
soil, poaching of bankside vegetation, or disturbance of spawning
grounds further contribute to declining ecological quality.
If we are thinking sustainably, we must acknowledge
human utilisation as fully interconnected with ecosystem functions,
and that catchment integrity depends as much on economic flows
as those of water, nutrients, organisms and sediments. Disparities
in remuneration for land use across catchments can only contribute
to disparities in investment in diffuse pollution control. Given
the disproportionate harm that can result from damage to the upper
catchment, for example to fish spawning sites or other sensitive
ecosystems, inappropriate and damaging land use may have massive
consequences for ecological status in the catchment as a whole.
We need a set of economic incentives sophisticated enough to support
truly sustainable land use.
Today, land managers accept the need for sustainable
development, yet are forced to compete with each other for a share
of the diminishing rewards of over-production of food using energy—and
chemically-intensive practices that are widely acknowledged as
being inherently unsustainable, often taking place on increasingly
less well-suited land. The demand for "cheap food at any
cost" is being subsidised by environmental degradation and
the breakdown of the rural economy and infrastructure at staggering
scales, with cheaper imported food adding further pressure to
land used for domestic production. However, food production is
not the only form of land use and, so long as we stay stuck in
an anachronistic "Dig for Victory" mindset of maximising
yield from available land, our land use habits will continue to
contribute to grain and butter mountains on the back of environmentally-damaging
subsidies and practices that also unravel the rural economy. If
the net "produce" of modern intensive farming is a loss
of nature's life-support services, of wildlife and natural beauty,
then our forms of farming are clearly unsustainable and of no
long-term benefit to humanity.
One of the lessons learned from the 2001 Foot
and Mouth Disease epidemic is that fisheries and tourism may be
as significant, or possibly more so, than farming as economic
engines of rural England and Wales2,3. Due recognition of the
value of fisheries to the rural economy forms aspects of three
recommendations of the 2000 Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Review4,
which summarises research suggesting that the annual fisheries-related
contribution to the economy of England and Wales may be £3.3
to 5 billion. Very significant figures compared, for example,
to an annual spend of £2.5 billion by the water industry
across England and Wales, and also representing significant employment
associated with anglers' spend on travel, food and drink, amenities,
etc. And this is, of course, before we start looking into the
relative impacts upon ecological quality of alternative uses of
land. We already have a demonstration that targeted intervention
in economic flows within rural catchments may support land use
contributing to Good Ecological Status. An example is the use
of SAC (Special Area for Conservation) incentives under the EU
Habitats Directive, yielding real improvements to the ecology
of the Wye catchment. More sophisticated economic tools are also
required to avoid developing a culture of dependency upon conservation
payments, which may merely lead to the division of rural areas
into factory farms interspersed with isolated "biological
museums". Their isolation, one from another and from the
natural processes that mould the habitat upon which ecosystems
and their functions depend, means that the ecological quality
of scattered reserves can only deteriorate over time.
Rewarding uses suited to the characteristics
and carrying capacity of land, and incrementally reducing that
reward for less appropriate practices, must be broadened within
whatever subsidy system replaces the much unloved Common Agricultural
Policy (CAP). CAP restructure must also move away from subsidising
outputs from agricultural land, regardless of their consequent
environmental, social and economic costs, instead rewarding sensitive
and appropriate land use practices that revitalise the rural economy
and make protection of natural resources a sound investment on
the part of land-owners. This must include a mechanism to reward
uses of land traditionally regarded as "unproductive",
including "farming" for wildlife benefit, floodwater
storage and purification, fisheries and tourism, and protection
of valuable hydrological, physico-chemical, ecological and other
ecosystem functions. Many wider benefits may flow from these functions,
yielding higher economic, social and ecological benefits across
the catchment than traditional "productive" practices.
To ensure these are sustained, along with the rural economy upon
which they depend, we need to ensure that land managers are able
to make a decent income from appropriate use of the land including
recognition of the revenues from angling, tourism and other water-related
activities. Otherwise, they will remain trapped by the demands
of an economic climate in which it was essential to screw the
last ounce of productivity from farmed land just to compete and
survive.
This may be possible by full-cost accounting
in the way we invest within river basins. Examples abound of costs
incurred in "downstream" flood defences to offset lost
floodwater storage functions in the upper reaches of catchments,
the stocking of fish to compensate for declining natural recruitment,
rising costs of abstracted river water bearing contaminants from
further upstream, etc. A depleted catchment ecosystem inevitably
has a diminished capacity to sustain society's needs. Rarely are
these costs recognised and internalised in decision-making today.
NEW APPROACHES
TO AGRICULTURE
Agriculture retains a vital role in the countryside,
and remains a key feature of a more sustainable Britain, though
we have to get smarter about planning agricultural systems of
which food production is but one element. We already have successful
examples of measures appropriate to the WFD and to our own best
interests. We could, for example, expand the approach of "General
Binding Rules" (GBRs) set out in MAFF's (now DEFRA's) Code
of Good Agricultural Practice for Water (COGAP for water), which
stipulates that farmers may choose to grow what they want but
must do so within prescribed Codes of Practice. At present, this
guidance is non-statutory and is rarely if ever read by farmers,
yet is entirely consistent with any serious attempt to achieve
sustainable land use by tuning crop choice to land type and consequent
risk to rivers and other ecosystems. If we are serious about sustainable
development, GBRs would be extended to all crops, other land uses
and all land types, then set these on a statutory basis using
the Basic Measures provisions of the WFD.
Another anomaly to be redressed relates to major
food retailers, which exert arguably the single greatest leverage
over decision-making in UK agriculture today. The wellbeing of
the environment, the viability of soils, the ecological quality
of waters and the vitality of the rural economy remain barely
visible features amongst their diverse Quality Assurance schemes.
Where lowest price is the overwhelming driver, produce may be
sourced overseas where ecological and social costs are "out
of sight and out of mind", allowing UK farming to wither
on the vine or else compete through wringing the last drops of
productivity from land with little account taken of ecological
degradation. Today, the UK water industry is heavily regulated,
largely due to its potential impact on the water environment,
so it seems unfair and unwise to leave rural affairs entirely
under the overbearing influence of private economic interests.
We need a new paradigm of collaboration between different interests—Government,
retailers, the farming industry, and others in the "food
chain" including consumers—if we are to realise the
benefits, and long-term the self-benefits, of the principles enshrined
in the WFD.
There are new pressures on land arising from
increasing interest in non-food crops to provide for future needs
for energy, chemical feedstock, fibre, pharmaceuticals and dyes.
Though undoubtedly important, unfounded prejudgements that "naturally-produced"
alternatives to "dirty chemicals" are a direct highway
to sustainability overlook their potential impacts on conversion
of land to intensive agriculture. We need to be more realistic
about the sustainability implications of all of the complex changes
that will undoubtedly arise in British catchments (exacerbated
of course by the implications of climate change).
THE BUILT
ENVIRONMENT
The urban environment faces an equally complex
set of challenges, including overflows of sewage from unsatisfactory
combined sewer overflows (CSOs), diffuse runoff from hard urban
surfaces including road drainage systems, illegal connections
of foul drainage into surface water drainage, etc. We have in
our hands some potential solutions (for example sustainable drainage
systems, or SuDS) that are surely perfect candidates for addressing
the "upstream" causes of problems. If applied through
the planning system in new-build or retrofit, under the WFD's
Basic Measures provisions, we may deliver a presumption in favour
of their ubiquitous application. Only where problems remain intractable
in the medium term should we plan for treatment of symptoms rather
than causes, a more appropriate use of the Supplementary Measures
(for example, the injection of oxygen to relieve short-term effects
of storm sewage pollution, as applied in the tidal Thames in London
by the "Thames Bubbler").
RECOGNISING THE
BENEFITS OF
INVESTING IN
HEALTHY ECOSYSTEMS
Society depends entirely upon the "work"—the
natural functions—provided for us by catchment ecosystems,
including deceleration of run-off and buffering of floodwater,
water storage and purification, economic goods and places of quiet
enjoyment, and a host of other "quality of life" benefits
besides. The WFD is above all founded upon the idea of the interconnectedness
of land and water within catchments, which must influence the
way we use them and the economic paradigms that drive decision-making.
The vision inherent in the WFD provides a powerful opportunity
to invest in a future rich not only in biological diversity but
also economic potential. The intactness of ecosystems and their
functions provides catchments with resilience to better support
our needs, to withstand pressures such as climate change, and
to avert the need for expensive interference, control and repair.
We have a simple choice. Grasp the opportunity
afforded by the Directive or constrict it at birth by a too dogmatic
a "neutral translation" into existing, manifestly unsustainable
regulations. We may save money in the short term but will, in
the longer term, rob ourselves of the protection and improvement
of "quality of life" afforded by thriving catchment
ecosystems. Now is the time to do some of that "joined up
thinking" that we always hear about, yet seldom if ever see.
The Natural Step
15 August 2002
REFERENCES
1. First Consultation Paper on the Implementation
of the EC Water Framework Directive. DETR (March 2001), London.
2. The Rural Task Force Report. (2001).
Tackling the Impact of Foot and Mouth Disease on the Rural
Economy. DEFRA (October 2001), London.
3. The Countryside Agency. (2001). Foot
and Mouth Disease: The State of the Countryside. Ref CAX63.
The Countryside Agency, Cheltenham.
4. Salmon and Freshwater Fisheries Review.
(2000). MAFF and the National Assembly for Wales.
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