Natura 2000 and the regulation of agricultural ammonia emissions

This article provides a comparative analysis of the regulation of ammonia emissions, primarily from livestock installations, in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. It discusses the challenges of regulating agricultural ammonia emissions in view of the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union (cjeu) on Art. 6(3) of the Habitats Directive. It is argued that the need to ensure certainty concerning the absence of significant effects on Natura 2000 sites is challenged by the uncertainties regarding both the state of individual habitat types and the potential impact of individual projects. A more integrated or programmatic approach may provide an alternative approach to individual assessments, but it is necessary to ensure that additional loads from new or enlarged livestock installations are permitted in areas with high ammonia loads only where it is certain that a programmatic approach will ensure that there are no harmful effects. This might be an almost impossible task

1 of 25 Journal of Environmental Law Advance Access published March 11

Abstract This article presents a comparative perspective of the implementation of the Water Framework Directive (WFD). The investigated Member States are the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Romania, Italy, Spain and Portugal. The implementation of the WFD in these Member States was researched with the help of legal experts who completed questionnaires or were interviewed and-limited to five Member States-through interviews with civil servants who were involved with the implemention of the WFD. This research demonstrates that the WFD leaves so much room for discretion that the Member States adopt different approaches concerning the implementation of fundamental parts of the Directive. Although the need for flexibility due to the differences in circumstances is recognised, the new governance approach of the WFD demonstrates a risk that unambitious national practices will lea

Adaptation to Climate Change in European Water Law and Policy

Climate change exacerbates the challenges that water management nowadays has to deal with. This highlights the need for a legal framework that promotes adaptation by addressing the ecological value of water and the risks of flooding and drought. This paper analyzes to what extent the European legal framework meets this need. This is evaluated by analyzing to what extent the Water Framework Directive, the Floods Directive and the Water Scarcity and Drought Strategy build resilience. Resilience is an important concept in the adaptation to climate change discourse. It refers to the capacity of a social-ecological system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks. This paper uses five criteria to measure this: (1) the flexibility of rules and (2) the adaptiveness of such rules (3) openness, public participation and access to the courts (4) multilevel governance at the bioregional scale and (5) effectiveness. The European legal framework partly meets these criteria. It offers a river basin approach and both the setting of goals and objectives and their achievement is a multilevel, cyclical process, which includes public participation. However, the achievement of the goals is not easily enforceable and coordination within international river basins is legally weak. This detracts from the expected effectiveness of the EU legal framework in promoting adaptation by protecting the aquatic ecosystem and reducing flood and drought risks

Tackling pollution of the Mediterranean Sea from land-based sources by an integrated ecosystem approach and the use of the combined international and European legal regimes

The successful protection of marine and freshwater areas and ecosystems, including specially protected areas, is highly dependent on the effectiveness of an integrated approach to prevent and combat land-based pollution. Several legal regimes have been developed to regulate and solve this kind of pollution on the international level as well as on the European level. Therefore, this integrated approach requires coherence between European and international legal regimes and between the regulation of freshwater and the seas. An effective legal regime should provide clear goals and clear responsibilities and take into account the relevant impacts and pressures and the transboundary elements of the action against pollution of the sea from land-based source areas, and therefore respond to the need for cooperation between states and the need for an integrated approach to regulate all impacts and pressures that could influence the goals and targets for the specific protected areas. Integrated programmes of measures are necessary and so are arrangements for cooperation and dispute settlement. The protection of the Mediterranean Sea is taken as an example of the integrated ecosystem approach to protect marine regions. The article focuses on pollution caused by land-based sources. The combined rights and obligations under EU law and international law – in particular the Barcelona Convention – are discussed, as well as the required integrated approach towards the marine environment. Existing legal protection regimes for marine regions and river basin catchment areas in both international and European law are analyzed in order to identify the promises and challenges for a coherent legal regime

Governance of the Sponge City Programme in China with Wuhan as a case study

AbstractIn 2015, China?s national government initiated a Sponge City Programme to address its urban flood issues. A sponge city is a city built around the concept of managing water in an ecologically sustainable way. The intention is to improve urban resilience through rainwater capture, storage and use. This article applies a four-mode governance framework to analyze the programme. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the programme implementation and provides recommendations

Governance of the Sponge City Programme in China with Wuhan as a case study

AbstractIn 2015, China?s national government initiated a Sponge City Programme to address its urban flood issues. A sponge city is a city built around the concept of managing water in an ecologically sustainable way. The intention is to improve urban resilience through rainwater capture, storage and use. This article applies a four-mode governance framework to analyze the programme. It identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the programme implementation and provides recommendations

Implementation arrangements for climate adaptation in the netherlands: Characteristics and underlying mechanisms of adaptive governance

Adaptation to climate change is a rapidly emerging policy domain. Over the last decade we have witnessed many attempts to enhance the climate robustness of agriculture, urban development, water systems, and nature to an increase in flood and drought risks due to a higher variability in rainfall patterns and sea level rise. In the vulnerable Dutch delta, regional authorities have developed adaptation measures that deal with flood risk, the availability of fresh water, subsidence, and salt water intrusion. In view of all the uncertainties that surround climate change, scientists emphasize that it should be possible to make changes when conditions change or insights evolve. The concept of adaptive governance has been introduced to facilitate the process of climate adaptation. Adaptive governance requires the availability of governance arrangements that facilitate adaptiveness by being flexible to enable adjustment. Although flexible arrangements for adaptation to climate change make sense from an adaptive governance perspective, from a more bureaucratic, political, and legal perspective, there might be good reasons to make arrangements as solid and robust as possible. In this article we answer the question to what extent the arrangements used to implement various adaptation measures are really adaptive and what mechanisms play a role in obstructing the accomplishment of adaptive arrangements. By analyzing and comparing nine adaptation cases, dealing with different climate issues, and the arrangements used to implement them from both a governance and a legal perspective, we are able to get more detailed insight into the main characteristics of the selected arrangements, their degree of adaptiveness, and the main hampering mechanisms for the creation or functioning of adaptive arrangements

Solidarity in water management

textabstractAdaptation to climate change can be an inclusive and collective, rather than an individual effort. The choice for collective arrangements is tied to a call for solidarity. We distinguish between one-sided (assisting community members in need) and two-sided solidarity (furthering a common interest) and between voluntary and compulsory solidarity. We assess the strength of solidarity as a basis for adaptation measures in six Dutch water management case studies. Traditionally, Dutch water management is characterized by compulsory two-sided solidarity at the water board level. Since the French times, the state is involved through compulsory national solidarity contributions to avoid societal disruption by major floods. In so far as this furthers a common interest, the contributions qualify as two-sided solidarity, but if it is considered assistance to flood-prone areas, they also qualify as one-sided solidarity. Although the Delta Programme explicitly continues on this path, our case studies show that solidarity continues to play an important role in Dutch water management in the process of adapting to a changing climate, but that an undifferentiated call for solidarity will likely result in debates over who should pay what and why. Such discussions can lead to cancellation or postponement of adaptation measures, which ar