Catchment Management for Protection of Water Resources

Project Status: Completed
Type of Project: Research Project
Principal Investigator: Mr Laurence Smith, SOAS, University of London (Email)

Website
Publications, Data and Other Outputs
Policy and Practice Notes

Objectives

This project is designed to develop guidance on improving water quality by reducing pollution and identify the governance arrangements that would be necessary to achieve this.

A clean environment and good water supplies are vital to human health, quality of life and economic well-being. In the UK, nitrate and pesticides are recognised health risks, and the need to control phosphorus from agricultural and domestic wastewater is paramount in achieving 'good ecological status' for water bodies as required by the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). Indicative estimates of the costs of water pollution from agriculture alone are in excess of £250 million per annum, whilst failure to meet WFD requirements by 2015 may incur heavy fines.

Reductions in pollution from point sources have been achieved through regulation, but the underlying water quality problem in much of the UK is diffuse pollution derived from current and past land use (agricultural and urban) plus atmospheric deposition. Diffuse pollution cannot easily be regulated because its sources are numerous and dispersed, its pathways difficult to trace, its incidence uneven, and the costs of monitoring and enforcement high. Technical solutions to mitigate diffuse pollution exist in the form of best management practices for farming and other polluting land uses, but ultimately changes in land use may be needed. This is challenging because whilst farming is the main source of diffuse pollution, it also produces goods, livelihoods and landscape attributes that sustain rural communities and are valued by wider society, raising the questions of how best to protect water resources and who should bear the costs?

In the broadest terms the means to bring about the changes in behaviour and land use necessary include: taxes and subsidies; regulation; voluntary agreements with land users (with or without compensation); advisory and education campaigns; and land purchase and retirement. The focus for this research is how to determine and implement the best combination of measures for a specific catchment, given local conditions and wider policy constraints.

The objective is to develop a 'catchment management template' that provides guidance on the necessary steps to achieve improvement, the governance arrangements that will be necessary for this, and a 'tool kit' of techniques for scientific research and for organisational and institutional development. This will demonstrate how to: integrate scientific investigation with policy, governance and legal provisions; foster decision-making and implementation at the level of government best able to resolve conflicting interests within catchments; and share best scientific, planning and management procedures with catchment programmes in other countries.

The research will involve a detailed comparative analysis of catchment governance systems and institutional arrangements for the management of catchment water resources drawn from case examples in the USA, UK and nearby Europe, and supported by lessons from other wider international experience. A particular focus will be identification of processes, organisational structures and institutional arrangements (including legal provisions) that can promote and facilitate effective local coordination and action.

Two catchments in the UK have also been selected for intensive research, the upper reaches of the River Tamar in southwest England and the River Thurne in the Norfolk Broads. These have been selected for their contrasting physical characteristics (upland and lowland, respectively) and farming systems (dairy and arable, respectively). The upper Tamar lakes are also important as a supply of drinking water while the shallow lakes in the Broads are internationally recognised for their high biodiversity value. The project will research the current issues, water quality targets, pollution mitigation potential and administrative constraints in these two catchments. Results will be integrated with the findings of the wider comparison of international catchment management programmes, feeding into the generic "catchment management template".