Rob van der Veeren

Twenty-five years ago, the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) was the first EU Directive to systematically integrate economic analysis and instruments as supporting tools intended to contribute to achieving its core environmental policy objectives: attaining good water status, reducing pollution, promoting sustainable use, and protecting and restoring aquatic ecosystems. As the original deadline for the WFD’s objectives (2027) approaches, discussions are underway on the lessons learnt and the future of EU water policy and management. This paper documents the experience of a group of water economists from a broad range of different European countries, who participated in the final adoption and first implementation steps of the economic provisions of the WFD. It analyses the role water economics has played in practice. Based on an overview of the lessons learned from their 25 years’ experience, this paper provides insights on how economics, as currently required by the WFD, could better support EU water policy and management, and what are the new and forthcoming challenges that water economics may need to respond to. The paper shows that over the past 25 years, the WFD’s implementation process has revealed a persistent structural mismatch between water policy — meant to be adaptive, integrative and cross-sectoral — and water management, which has increasingly become an end in itself. The emergence of the EU Green Deal and the Water Resilience Initiative offer a new context to revisit and revitalize the WFD’s original ambition — aligning ambitious water policy goals with supportive and coherent water management. In line with this, this paper argues for a strategic reform of the WFD’s rules, methods and processes to support more integrated, resilient and future-oriented water governance — one in which economic analysis becomes a meaningful input to decision-making.

This paper presents the Dutch ‘Delta Plan for Agricultural Water Management’ (in Dutch: ‘Deltaplan Agrarisch Waterbeheer’; DAW). This is a voluntary, tailor-made initiative in which farmers, water authorities and their organisations work together to achieve environmental objectives, and to prevent damage caused by droughts and floods, while ensuring an economically strong and sustainable agricultural sector. Drawing on a decade of DAW experiences, this study highlights achievements, lessons learned, and future challenges. Results show that, even though DAW is under pressure due to a shortage of independent advisors, DAW facilitated information and knowledge exchange, and trust-building, which supports participating farmers to improve agricultural management practices. Furthermore, the voluntary nature of DAW, while a strength in that it enables farmers to adopt measures tailored to their specific circumstances, also results in a fragmented pattern of participation. This uneven uptake makes it difficult to assess the effectiveness of measures at the farm scale in relation to the realisation of contributing to EU objectives, such as the European Water Framework Directive (WFD).

Ecosystem Accounting provides a framework to measure and value relationships amongst ecosystems, society and the economy. The accounts measure ecosystem extent, condition and services, providing the means to identify and internalise ecological degradation, as well as understanding the risks and dependencies of economic activities on the environment and tracking progress towards sustainable development. The OSPAR Convention, which concerns the protection of the Marine Environment for the North-East Atlantic, has committed to accounting for natural capital and ecosystem services, where the UN System of Environmental Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) provides an international accounting standard for guidance in compiling accounts. Here, we describe the first attempt in compiling accounts aligned with SEEA EA at a Regional Sea scale. We: (i) identified existing open access data, (ii) produced accounts for selected ecosystems and valued their services and asset value and (iii) identified challenges and lessons learned. For ecosystem services, we measured fish provisioning, carbon sequestration and outdoor recreation from coastal and marine environments across OSPAR contracting parties. The exercise identified lack of fitting data at regional level, spatially-explicit linkages and harmonisation need to be overcome to further expand accounts. This work represents an initial step to progress on ecosystem accounting and demonstrates that even with limited data and incomplete time-series, accounts can start being compiled to identify data gaps and prioritising next steps.

Ecosystem Accounting provides a framework to measure and value relationships between ecosystems, society and the economy. The accounts measure ecosystem extent, condition, and services, providing the means to identify and internalise ecological degradation, as well as understanding the risks and dependencies of economic activities on the environment and tracking progress towards sustainable development. The OSPAR Convention, which concerns the protection of the Marine Environment for the North-East Atlantic, has committed to accounting for natural capital and ecosystem services, where the UN System of Environmental Economic Accounting – Ecosystem Accounting (SEEA EA) provides an international accounting standard for guidance in compiling accounts. Here, we describe the first attempt in compiling accounts aligned with SEEA EA at a Regional Sea scale. We (i) identified existing open access data, (ii) produced accounts for selected ecosystems and valued their services and asset value, and (iii) identified challenges and lessons learned. For ecosystem services, we measured fish provisioning, carbon sequestration, and outdoor recreation from coastal and marine environments across OSPAR contracting parties. The exercise identified lack of fitting data at regional level, spatially explicit linkages and harmonisation need to be overcome to further expand accounts. This work represents an initial step to progress on ecosystem accounting and demonstrates that even with limited data and incomplete timeseries, accounts can start compiling to identify data gaps, and prioritize next steps.

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) prescribes cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) as an economic tool for the minimisation of costs when formulating programmes of measures to be implemented in the European river basins by the year 2009. The WFD does not specify, however, which approach to CEA has to be taken by the EU member states. In this paper the lack of a standardised approach to CEA for the implementation of the WFD is taken as the point of departure. The aim of the paper is to discuss and evaluate two pragmatic approaches to CEA based on case studies recently performed in The Netherlands and Denmark. The case studies allow for the comparison of a quantitative and a qualitative approach to CEA at the water body and river basin level and for an evaluation of the approaches in terms of their practical applicability, their transparency and the extent to which they render sound results for decision-making. Conclusions are drawn with regard to the suitability of the two approaches for the implementation of the EU WFD.