The transition of EU water policy towards the Water Framework Directive’s Integrated River Basin Management paradigm

Introduced in 2000 to reform and rationalise water policy and management across the European Union (EU) Member States (MS), the Water Framework Directive (WFD), the EU’s flagship legislation on water protection, is widely acknowledged as the embodiment and vessel for the application of the Integrated River Basin Management (IRBM) paradigm. Its ecological objectives, perhaps even more challenging than the prospect of statutory catchment planning itself, were for all EU waters to achieve ‘good status’ by 2015 (except where exemptions applied) and the prevention of any further deterioration. In support of the upcoming WFD review in 2019, the paper reviews the transition of EU policies that led to the adoption of the WFD, to identify the reasons why the Directive was introduced and what it is trying to deliver, and to place progress with its implementation into context. It further investigates reasons that might have limited the effectiveness of the Directive and contributed to the limited delivery and delays in water quality improvements. Findings reveal that different interpretations on the Directive’s objectives and exemptions left unresolved since its negotiation, ambiguity and compromises observed by its Common Implementation Strategy and lack of real support for the policy shift required have all been barriers to the harmonised transposition of the IRBM paradigm, the key to delivering good ecological status. The 2019 WFD review offers a unique opportunity to realign the implementation of the Directive to its initial aspirations and goals

Combined sewer overflows: relating event duration monitoring data to wastewater systems' capacity in England

Water pollution caused by the frequent use of combined sewer overflows (CSOs) has been attracting increased media and political coverage in England as in other places in the world. Considering that each of the country's 14 346 CSOs has been assessed for their environmental risk potential, as defined by the Environment Agency, and they have each been permitted to act as a storm overflow is indicative of a more systemic problem than currently perceived. While looking at the duration and frequency of discharges from individual CSOs not much can be said about their causes nor about what needs to be done to reduce them, here through an extensive investigation of event duration monitoring (EDM) data for 2021 and 2020, CSO spills are shown to be an issue across all sewerage companies related to how they operate their systems. By analysing EDM data considering the type and location of CSOs, and the sewerage networks they are connected to, our findings reveal the chronic under capacity of the English wastewater systems as a fundamental cause behind the increased frequency and duration of CSO spills. Other than pumping stations, 82% of the CSOs with the maximum spill duration per system were located at storm tanks and inlets of treatment works and had on average significantly higher spill durations in systems with insufficient hydraulic capacity both in 2020 and 2021, suggesting that CSOs are used to protect the works under peak dry weather flow conditions. Such frequent, and in some cases independent of rainfall, use of CSOs, could have detrimental effects for the receiving environment, as well as put thousands of water users at risk

A participatory ecosystems services approach for pressure prioritisation in support of the Water Framework Directive

Research data for this article: The data are provided as supplementary material available online at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041618303486?via%3Dihub#s0050 .Copyright © 2018 The Authors. The pressure and impact analysis is an important process in integrated river basin management and a key procedural element of the EU Water Framework Directive. It aims to inform both the assessment of water body status and the development of management responses. However, the Directive does not provide prescriptive guidance on how it should be carried out and during the 1st river basin cycle, its application proved to be a real challenge. Incorporating ecosystem services as indicators of impacts, a participatory framework for pressure prioritisation is presented here. While various methods exist for engaging stakeholders in river basin management, the framework allows for the ecosystem approach to be operationalised through a risk assessment perspective, in the context of the pressure impact analysis. Applying this to a case study in England, we demonstrate how a ranking of pressures can be delivered based on stakeholders’ perception of how the delivery of ecosystem services is affected by each pressure and incorporating their value as indicator of the magnitude of the impact. This approach allows for a more systematic way to effectively prioritise significant pressures and therefore select appropriate programmes of measures in line with the Directive’s integrated river basin management paradigm.European Union’s Seventh Programme for research, technological development, and demonstration under grant agreement no. 603629-ENV-2013-6.2.1-Globaqua and the NERC funded project A Novel Framework for Predicting Emerging Chemical Stressor Impacts in Complex Ecosystems, NERC Reference: NE/S000348/1

Progress with monitoring and assessment in the wfd implementation in five european river basins: Significant differences but similar problems

Copyright © 2018 The Authors. The river basin approach of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the introduction of ecological status represent a shift in the assessment and management of freshwater systems from discipline-specific to more holistic, catchment-based principles. At the core of the WFD’s approach are catchments as highly interconnected systems. Despite strict timetables, progress towards achieving the WFD objectives has been slow, with deterioration in some cases not being halted. In this paper, looking at evidence from five European basins (Adige, Anglian, Ebro, Evrotas and Sava) we identify some of the key implementation challenges faced by each catchment during the development and implementation of the 1st River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs) of 2009. Despite significant differences in socio-ecological conditions, geographic coverage and starting points in the implementation between these river basins, findings highlight some similar key issues. The lack of a common systemic understanding of each river basin and detailed monitoring data to capture pressure-status interactions in order to anticipate how the system will react to interventions; as well as compliance driven implementation efforts were underlying problems in all five study areas. While some improvements to address these problems can be seen in the 2nd River Basin Management Planning Cycle (2015–2016), our findings demonstrate that a more effective approach is to question the deviation of the whole implementation from the directive’s systemic nature and therefore improve the adaptive, collaborative, participatory and interdisciplinary nature of the implementation efforts.European Communities 7th Framework Programme Funding under Grant agreement no. 603629-ENV-2013-6.2.1-GLOBAQUA

Unpacking the complexity of the UK plastic packaging value chain: A stakeholder perspective

The pace to achieving a sustainable plastics economy remains noticeably slow. This could be due to a lack of understanding of the role and importance of stakeholder dynamics in the plastic packaging system. Therefore, this study aims to unpack and assess the role of stakeholders in improving the plastics recycling rate and circularity in the UK, using polyethylene terephthalate (PET) drinks bottles value chain as a case study. Via the theoretical lens of stakeholder theory the study identifies and groups the stakeholders in the PET drinks bottles value chain, and tries to make sense of, and analyse, their complex interactions via the use of the Complex Value Optimisation for Resource Recovery (CVORR) systems thinking approach. This integrated approach reveals, that even though external stakeholders (e.g. NGOs, trade associations) engage with internal stakeholders (e.g. suppliers, consumers, investors), and vice versa, at different levels and scales in promoting the circularity in the PET drink bottles value chain, there is a strong drive in incentivising the production and consumption processes. This is driven by the significant lobbying power of internal stakeholders operating upstream of the PET bottles value chain (i.e. producers and brand owners), that is supported by financial institutions, and which, strongly influences national and local government policies and decision-making processes. Meanwhile, the waste management processes are short-sighted, being unable to gain improved momentum and increase the PET bottles recycling rates. This dynamic conceals, and somewhat retains, the prevailing resistance in removing the infrastructural, regulatory and technological lock-ins. A collaboration between internal and external stakeholders is paramount to sustainably managing PET drinks bottles in the UK and achieving a transition to a sustainable circular plastics economy. Creating a level playing field and fostering a closer collaboration between all stakeholders involved in the system can aid the development of new value networks, and support new policy interventions that can improve circularity in the plastic packaging sector

Unpacking the complexity of the UK plastic packaging value chain: A stakeholder perspective

Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). The pace to achieving a sustainable plastics economy remains noticeably slow due to a lack of understanding on the role and importance of stakeholder dynamics in the plastic packaging system. This study aims to unpack and assess the role of stakeholders in improving plastics recycling rates and circularity in the UK, using polyethylene terephthalate (PET) drinks bottles value chain as a case study. Via the theoretical lens of stakeholder theory we identify and group the stakeholders involved in the PET drinks bottles value chain, and integrate this in the Complex Value Optimisation for Resource Recovery (CVORR) systems thinking approach to make sense of, and analyse, stakeholders complex interactions. Results highlight that even though, external stakeholders (e.g. NGOs, trade associations) engage on different levels and scales in promoting circularity in the PET bottles value chain, there is strong drive in incentivising production and consumption processes driven by the significant lobbying power of internal stakeholders operating upstream of the PET bottles value chain (i.e. producers and brand owners). This lobbying power, which arises from the well-established market of PET bottles in the UK, and its support by financial institutions, it strongly influences national and local government policies and decision-making processes. Meanwhile, the waste management processes are short-sighted, being unable to gain improved momentum and increasing the PET bottles recycling rates. This dynamic conceals, and somewhat retains, the prevailing resistance in removing the infrastructural, regulatory and technological lock-ins. The development of an interdisciplinary collaboration between internal and external stakeholders is paramount to sustainably managing PET drinks bottles in the UK and achieving a transition to a sustainable circular plastics economy. Fostering closer collaboration between all stakeholders involved in the system, can aid the development of new value networks and support new policy interventions that can improve circularity in the plastic packaging sector.Brunel University London as part of the Brunel Research Initiative & Enterprise Fund (BRIEF) award No.11683100, in the context of ‘Closing the Plastic Food Packaging Loop’ project, and generously supported by the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford

River network rearrangements promote speciation in lowland Amazonian birds

Large Amazonian rivers impede dispersal for many species, but lowland river networks frequently rearrange, thereby altering the location and effectiveness of river barriers through time. These rearrangements may promote biotic diversification by facilitating episodic allopatry and secondary contact among populations. We sequenced genome-wide markers to evaluate the histories of divergence and introgression in six Amazonian avian species complexes. We first tested the assumption that rivers are barriers for these taxa and found that even relatively small rivers facilitate divergence. We then tested whether species diverged with gene flow and recovered reticulate histories for all species, including one potential case of hybrid speciation. Our results support the hypothesis that river rearrangements promote speciation and reveal that many rainforest taxa are micro-endemic, unrecognized, and thus threatened with imminent extinction. We propose that Amazonian hyper-diversity originates partly from fine-scale barrier displacement processes-including river dynamics-which allow small populations to differentiate and disperse into secondary contact.Peer reviewe

Feature extraction based on bio-inspired model for robust emotion recognition

Emotional state identification is an important issue to achieve more natural speech interactive systems. Ideally, these systems should also be able to work in real environments in which generally exist some kind of noise. Several bio-inspired representations have been applied to artificial systems for speech processing under noise conditions. In this work, an auditory signal representation is used to obtain a novel bio-inspired set of features for emotional speech signals. These characteristics, together with other spectral and prosodic features, are used for emotion recognition under noise conditions. Neural models were trained as classifiers and results were compared to the well-known mel-frequency cepstral coefficients. Results show that using the proposed representations, it is possible to significantly improve the robustness of an emotion recognition system. The results were also validated in a speaker independent scheme and with two emotional speech corpora.Fil: Albornoz, Enrique Marcelo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; ArgentinaFil: Milone, Diego Humberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; ArgentinaFil: Rufiner, Hugo Leonardo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Santa Fe. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional. Universidad Nacional del Litoral. Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias Hídricas. Instituto de Investigación en Señales, Sistemas e Inteligencia Computacional; Argentin

Systems thinking as a paradigm shift for sustainability transformation

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted as reference and universal guidepost for transitioning to Sustainable Development by the United Nations in 2015 as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, are intended to be used as a set of interconnected goals and global targets for ‘Transforming our world’, as the 2030 Agenda is titled. This is a far more challenging task than business as usual; it requires systems thinking for understanding the conditions that generate and propagate sustainability challenges, moving away from the reductionist and anthropocentric thinking that created them in the first place. Taking a systems approach to addressing these challenges has been gaining currency with academics and policymakers alike, and here we make the case for holistic, integrated, and interdisciplinary thinking that challenges assumptions and worldviews, crucially based on public participation and engagement, to create the enabling conditions for sustainability to emerge. System transformations require interconnected changes to technologies, social practices, business models, regulations and societal norms, an intentional process designed to fundamentally alter the components and structures that cause the system to behave in its current unsustainable ways, a paradigm shift enabling the transition to sustainability

The EU Water Framework Directive: From great expectations to problems with implementation

The Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC (WFD) is widely accepted as the most substantial and ambitious piece of European environmental legislation to date. It has been referred to as a once in a generation opportunity to restore Europe's waters and a potential template for future environmental regulations. However, fifteen years since it was adopted, and with many problems and delays in its implementation, the WFD has not delivered its main objectives of non-deterioration of water status and the achievement of good status for all EU waters. Putting aside the daunting technical and organisational challenges of its implementation, this paper aims to shed light on why the great expectations that came with the WFD have not yet been fully realised. It reviews how the Directive has been interpreted, focusing on its intentions and how they were applied. The findings reveal the absence of the paradigm shift towards the systems (integrated) thinking that the WFD was grounded on, as a fundamental problem with its implementation. This is also evident in cases where the Directive has been criticised as a policy tool or when implementation efforts were reviewed, indicating misunderstandings even of its core principles. This inherent departure from the Directive's systemic intention and methodological approach needs further investigation, as it could be the reason behind many of its problems and delays. Unless current implementation efforts are reviewed or revised in light of this, enabling the paradigm shift required to ensure a more sustainable and holistic approach to water management, the fading aspirations of the initial great expectations that came with the Directive could disappear for good