Nanny Bressers Corinne Larrue Editors Land and Water Drought

Hans Bressers · Nanny Bressers Corinne Larrue Editors Governance for Drought Resilience Land and Water Drought Management in Europe Governance for Drought Resilience Hans Bressers • Nanny Bressers Corinne Larrue Editors Governance for Drought Resilience Land and Water Drought Management in Europe Editors Hans Bressers Corinne Larrue University of Twente Val de Marne Enschede, Overijssel Université Paris Est Créteil The Netherlands Marne-la-Vallée France Nanny Bressers Vechtstromen Water Authority Almelo The Netherlands ISBN 978-3-319-29669-2 ISBN 978-3-319-29671-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-29671-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016931423 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and the Author(s) 2016. This book is published open access. 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Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by SpringerNature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland Foreword Overcoming Drought and Water Shortages with Good Governance On June 20, 2013, a picture went viral on the Internet in which two students were seemingly sailing through the shopping streets of Enschede, my hometown and the biggest city in the region of Vechtstromen, a water authority in the east of the Netherlands. After an extraordinary downpour it was the first time ever that these streets were flooded. It was quickly forgotten that just days before this same city was regarded a risky “hotspot” of unusually high inner city temperatures after a long heat wave that caused many creeks in its rural surroundings to completely dry out. This example is consistent with a general pattern in many areas in Northwest Europe: weathers are often more extreme than they used to be and water management will have to cope with that, through increasing the resilience of our water systems. This book, based on the many insights that are gathered from the project “Benefit of governance in drought adaptation” (DROP, Interreg IVb NWE) pro- vides an overview of a variety of drought situations in six areas in Northwest Europe, the measures taken to improve these situations and especially an in-depth treatment of the governance conditions that support or restrict the realization of these measures. The people in Northwest Europe that have always, and rightfully so, regarded themselves as living in a water rich area not only need to get used to more weather extremes, but especially to one of the extremes: drought. The availability of sufficient water of apt quality for purposes such as agriculture, nature, and service and drinking water production has become less self-evident and will likely even become less certain in the future. Each of these three functions gets special attention in the comparative chapters in this book. Sufficient freshwater supply is also important for shipping, use, and discharge of cooling water, and for flushing waterways in the low-lying parts of the country to prevent saltwater intrusion in a country such as the Netherlands. Generally, sufficient freshwater supply is a matter of utmost importance as part of a good investment climate for economic activities that are v vi Foreword dependent on water. Nevertheless, outside of the realm of water experts the awareness of the risk of periods of present and future water scarcity is generally low and only slowly increasing. This lack of drought awareness among citizens (voters) and landowners (farmers) makes it difficult for water managers to impose a forceful drought resilience strategy. While doing everything that is possible given this shallow support base, it is therefore essential to simultaneously pay continuous attention to awareness raising. In this book six regions from five countries are studied: Germany, Belgium, France, the UK, and the Netherlands. While all regions share the common characteristics of the Northwest European area, such as on average sufficient water supply, a high level of economic development, and the context of European policy schemes, they also illustrate a high degree of variation in their specific situations, hydrology, water use, and institutional arrangements for water management. This variety in the situation on the ground requires tailored action. Different packages of measures are possible to increase resilience toward drought. Three general strategies can be discerned. The first is a set of reactive measures. To these belong the transport of water from other regions or from bigger rivers to the dry areas. Something that is not only costly, but can also have negative side effects, for instance, on water quality in vulnerable nature areas. Another one is setting minimal flow requirements, for instance, to protect aquatic biotopes. While reactive it also induces more preventive measures. Among the preventive measures are all kinds of interventions to save and hold water available from wet periods, and to increase the buffering capacity of the soil and the water system. Lastly there are measures of the adaptive strategy: to accept the limitations of the natural system and consequently adapt the water use to the drought risks that the system generates. Of course, farmers could still decide to grow high value but vulnerable crops on drought-prone lands, but when yield fails every ten years or so, they should view it as an entrepreneurial risk that they cannot have avoided or compensated by public authorities. While water demand management measures like these are still unusual, it is wise to start preparing the support basis for them and develop ideas on their future implementation. All strategies require an appropriate land use and a robust water system. The characteristics of the landscape and those of the water system should be in har- mony. As with water uses the natural conditions should be put center stage. Thus, not “water levels should be adjusted to follow chosen human land and water uses,” but “land and water uses should follow water levels as they result from natural circumstances.” For both the resilience of the water system and the quality of the landscape and cityscape, so-called green–blue veins and grids are of crucial importance. These are not only of esthetical value, which is important in its own right, but also provide the function of improving buffering capacity for both too much and too little water. The risk is that more attention for floods leads to measures that increase vulnerability for droughts, or the other way around. But since both are occurring now with more frequency, this would be an inappropriate response. As the Somerset case and several other examples in this book show, there is certainly a need for an increased integration of flood and drought management. Foreword vii A call for further integration is justified but not unproblematic. The challenges put forward to the governance of water systems are manifold and dynamic. Consequently expert knowledge on, for instance, hydrology or engineering, while still essential, is not enough. The need for a sufficient support basis by both the people involved and the financial resources needed adds to the complexity. In 1997 John Dryzek discerned in his book “The Politics of the Earth” three what he called ‘discourses’: leave it to the experts: administrative rationalism, leave it to the people: democratic pragmatism, and leave it to the market: economic rationalism. While a discourse is a way of framing a subject, including some and excluding other issues, using key words and stories to reinforce that way of thinking and shield it from other ways, the challenge for water governance nowadays is precisely to overcome such boundaries. Thereby the expert side is becoming broader, with also multi-actor project management skills and governance expertise. For the people’s side their appreciation of the waterways in their surroundings is important, but also their sense of responsibility to guard this heritage. Water management is not only about applying knowledge in the right technocratic way, it is also about the equal consideration of interests. And for the market side water pricing for economic activities’ water use, and innovative water treatment that produces energy and other resources, like nitrates, phosphates and even clean service water, contribute to the development of a blue-based economy.

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