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,
w.howarth@kent.ac.uk
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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’.
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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4/2. Global Aim for Water
Management
• “IWRM is a process which promotes the coordinated 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)
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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)
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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!
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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.
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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.
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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.
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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.
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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.
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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 humancaused 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.
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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 riskbased 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
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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.
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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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.
Bill Howarth, University of Kent,
IWRM Regulation
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