Catchment management and conservation covenants

The UK is doing some very interesting things with their catchment management program. After my meeting with Chris Spray in Dundee, I was keen to hear more, so I met with Laurence Smith, head of the Centre for Development, Environment and Policy, at SOAS, University of London, who’s been exploring the response of farmers to NGOs seeking to arrange payment for ecosystem services, and in particular, what sort of legal arrangements they’d be willing to enter into and what sort of payments they would require. This work is feeding directly into the catchment management activities of the West Country Rivers Trust, as well as helping to inform the development of new legal instruments that enable the protection of changed land management practices in perpetuity, in the form of conservation covenants. We have similar legal instruments in Australia, but the current state of property law in the UK requires some substantial legal changes to make these instruments available. 

Laurence also shared some valuable insights into the way that farmers often prefer to work with a non-government organization, rather than the environmental regulator. This tendency is similar to what I’ve observed in the USA, and highlights the importance of separate decision-making roles. When one agency is responsible for regulating activities, it’s very hard for that agency to also explore other opportunities, as people can be unwilling to have open, frank discussions with an agency that has enforcement powers.

One of the fascinating aspects of the catchment management approach being piloted by the UK is that they are actively encouraging a diverse range of local agencies to take a lead role (called the catchment ‘host’ organisation) in the development of catchment management plans. Organizations interested in this role can ‘bid’ for the opportunity to host the plan development. This is a policy that creates space for non-government organizations to get involved, and really encourages the involvement of NGOs in catchment management. I’ll be really interested to see the results of the next round of catchment management planning, and see how the NGOs facilitate (or not!) the development of plans that the local community can embrace. 

Water reform in the UK: abstraction licences on unregulated rivers

London welcomed me with all its traditional charms: it rained. All day. Unceasingly. Coming from south-eastern Australia, I wasn’t entirely sure that such a thing could actually happen, so it had all the delights of novelty.

Fortunately, because as nice as my raincoat is, it’s not really a fashion piece, London then remembered that it was having the warmest, sunniest summer since 2006, and the rest of the week was glorious – golden, warm and lots of other words not usually associated with south-east England.

England and Wales are currently pursuing a range of water resource management reforms. I was lucky enough to meet with Henry Leveson-Gower, Head of Future Water Resource Management Project in DEFRA’s Water Availability and Quality Programme. He and his team are exploring policy options to facilitate water trading, and have been examining ways to unbundle water abstraction licences in England. This is quite similar to the water reform in Australia, where water licences have been separated into a permanent right (in Victorian parlance, a water share), a temporary right (a water allocation), a water use licence (which specifies where and how water can be used, and is attached to the land on which the water will be used) and a delivery share. However, in Australia, we’ve really only been successful at unbundling water licences on regulated systems, where water is held in large storages and called out for use. In England, they are attempting to do this for unregulated river systems, where the water licence gives you the right to extract a share of the available flow. This makes unbundling more complicated, as the location on the river is much more important in determining what the share of that flow will be, and the capacity to determine physical allocations of water (temporary rights) depends on predicting the flows in the river at a given period. I’m going to be very interested to see how they solve some of these problems, and whether any of those solutions might be transferable to Australia’s unregulated systems.

One of the components of the policy reform is using smart water metering technology, so that water meters provide water use data in real time to water managers, and access to water can be linked to real-time stream flow data. Australia has also been exploring the use of such smart meters in some rural catchments, and there’s a real opportunity to share some of these lessons with the UK. For example, in Victoria, Melbourne Water, in partnership with the Victorian State Government, have been piloting the use of smart meters in several of their rural catchments. I’m hoping that we can encourage policy makers everywhere to get better at sharing and learning from these sorts of projects.

Interestingly, there are some environmental charities (such as RSPB) who are purchasing land to restore and protect wetlands. In some cases, this includes a licence to extract water from the river to recreate flooding in the wetland. These environmental groups will also be able to trade their water under the new arrangements, and it will be interesting to see whether more environmental organizations enter this space and become environmental water managers in the UK. 

Flood risk management and Jane Austen: all part of a day out in Edinburgh

One of the serendipitous delights of this visit to the UK is the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The city is almost overwhelmed with visitors from all over the world, flocking through the streets in search of the fun and frivolity of the Fringe.

It can also be a bit much. The main streets and places like the Royal Mile are all but immovable, and the tourists (yes, that’s me too, I know) have taken over. I’m pretty sure that you’re not really supposed to pet police horses, for example, but the pair I observed yesterday were taking it all very patiently. Does it count as bribing a police officer if you’re making friends with his horse?

Luckily, I had the insights of an almost-local. Vanessa Collins lives just over the border in Newcastle and she braved the slightly dysfunctional rail network on Thursday morning to pop over for some brunch, a chat about water resource management and a viewing of Austentatious.

I think Edinburgh forgot it was still summer, and I woke up to mist snuggled up around the castle and the Scott monument. The Georgian terraces were equal parts obscured by mist and road works (apparently one must not mention the tram works. At all.), but the brunch was excellent (if you’re after something tasty and inexpensive, try Cafe Milk).

Vanessa is working for the Environment Agency, an extraordinarily large public agency in the UK responsible for sustainable development and environmental management, including water licensing and flood risk management. Apparently there are over 10,000 staff in the agency, working all over England. 

Vanessa is a civil engineer working as a project manager in the flood risk management area. England is trying to find ways to reduce flood risks to lower catchment towns, using a range of engineering solutions, including building bigger flood walls in towns, and finding ways to store more water in the upper catchment. What I find most interesting about this issue is that climate change is likely to make floods more frequent, and more extreme, but probably less predictable. So how do you invest in the flood mitigation measures, knowing that you’ll really need them at some future point, but until then, they aren’t really useful at all? Even more challenging: how do you hold space in a water storage to retain flood waters when storage levels are dropping? The corollary of increased flooding under climate change is that periods of low flow and drought are also likely to be more frequent. From what I can tell, this is less of a problem here in England than it is in Australia, for example, but it wasn’t so long ago that parts of England were drought stricken. Managing uncertainty and variability requires a new mindset, and it’s one that sits uncomfortably alongside accounting measures of capital investment. I think there’s going to be some interesting learning curves as our understanding of the new hydrology of many of our river systems develops over time.

I’m reminded of the work of Chris Spray at the University of Dundee in the Eddleston catchment, where upstream storage mechanisms are being enhanced using a combination of engineering solutions and ecosystem services like re-inserting meanders in the river, building wetlands and revegetating upper catchments. Researchers at the University of Newcastle are also working with the Environment Agency on a range of catchment management approaches to mitigate flooding in Belford (check out this and this).

None of these activities are cost free, and they all impose a trade-off between what you can use the water, space and money for now, as opposed to what you might need to use it for in the next flood. We don’t know when that will be, but we do know it will happen.

After all that, it seemed only logical to weave our way through Edinburgh’s mist-shrouded streets and parks, claim a space in the queue, and enjoy the hilarity of Austentatious. Improv comedy in the style of Jane Austen: who could ask for more?

Climate change and water law: my chance to get a UK perspective

Today’s blog post is brought to you all courtesy of the British Council – a non-political organisation working to build mutually beneficial and lasting relationships between the future leaders of the UK and over 100 countries worldwide.  

Thanks to their generous funding arrangement through my home university (University of Melbourne Law School), I’m heading to the UK tomorrow, where I’ll be meeting with academics and policy makers in water resource management.

The prospect of future climate change and the increasing variability and frequency of extreme weather events is forcing water resource managers everywhere to embrace new methods of managing water that enhance flexibility and responsiveness to changing environmental conditions. Both Australia and the UK have experienced severe drought and flood over the past decade, and in both countries, this is inspiring change and reform in water resource management.

The UK and Australia have a combination of some common experiences, along with differences in water law and hydrology, which provides an excellent opportunity to examine how water reform can play out in different circumstances. Australia and the UK have a history of sharing information and working together on policy issues, including water management, and I hope to build on this relationship (for a recent example, check out Professor Mike Young’s report for University College London’s Environment Institute).

English water law was the basis for early Australian water law, as the riparian rights regime was imported to Australia during colonization. In both cases, the original common law water rights have been overlaid by more recent statutory water rights. Following the release of the Water White Paper in 2011, the UK is looking to improve its statutory regime, leading to more flexible, responsive, environmentally sustainable and tradeable water licenses, and in particular, how to stimulate a water market, for retail, industry and agricultural water users. There are many points of similarity between the reforms the UK is currently experiencing, and those pursued in Australia as part of the National Water Initiative, including a need for change to ensure water use remains sustainable in a climate change world.

One of the big questions for such reform is: where does the environment fit when water markets are created? I'm looking forward to providing an Australian perspective on how the environment can be protected and managed within a water market, and the trade-offs that come with this approach. In addition, I hope to learn from the UK water resource managers how the environment can be managed and protected in systems that are not yet fully-allocated, and where riparian rights (rather than a full extractive rights regime) still have a role in water resource management. In particular, the Water Framework Directive requires focus on both quantity and quality. In Australia, the emphasis for environmental water managers has been almost solely on quantity of water, so there is much to learn about effective and efficient management of water quality for the aquatic environment.

The UK’s leadership in regulating privatization of its corporate water managers is also an area I am keen to explore. In Australia, corporatization has been used as a means to improve efficiency of operations, without proceeding to full privatization of water resource managers (which is often prohibited under state constitutions). Successful implementation often depends heavily on the power and capacity of the regulators. Corporatization is an ongoing process in Australia, and it is a very recent phenomenon for environmental water managers to use the corporate form. I’m really looking forward to discussing this with water corporatization specialists in the UK, such as Dr Sarah Hendry at the University of Dundee.

So, tomorrow I’m off to the UK. I’m heading to the University of Dundee first, then Edinburgh, back to London, where I’ll be visiting DEFRA and the Centre for Water and Development at SOAS London, and then out to the University of East Anglia. To finish up, I’ll be speaking at the Water and Society conference in New Forest in the first week of September. I promise to keep up a much more regular posting schedule this trip, so there’ll be more to come soon!