Moving Forward: The Implementation Challenge for Environmental Water Management

doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-803907-6.00027-9

Water for the Environment

from Policy and Science to Implementation and Management

2017, Pages 649-673

https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-803907-6.00027-9 Get rights and content

Abstract

Although there has been significant progress in environmental water management across the globe, a number of challenges remain in the establishment and delivery of environmental water regimes on the ground—the implementation challenge. This final chapter focuses on the directions to achieve successful implementation of environmental water policies and practice into the future, and is organized around six key questions: (1) How much water do rivers need? (2) How do we increase the number of rivers where environmental water is provided? (3) How can we embed environmental water management as a core element of water resource planning? (4) How can knowledge and experience be transferred and scaled more easily? (5) How can we enhance the legitimacy of environmental water programs? (6) How can we support the inclusion of adaptive management as standard practice? Many of these ongoing challenges are not technical in nature, but rather related to concepts of engagement, partnership, legitimacy, sharing of knowledge, and enabling institutional policies and structures.

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Cited by (16)

An electricity market-based approach to finance environmental flow restoration
2024, Journal of Environmental Management
As environmental flow demands become better characterized, improved water allocation and reservoir operating solutions can be devised to meet them. However, significant economic trade-offs are still expected, especially in hydropower-dominated basins. This study explores the use of the electricity market as both an institutional arrangement and an alternative financing source to handle the costs of implementing environmental flows in river systems managed for hydropower benefits. A framework is proposed to identify hydropower plants with sustainable operation within the portfolio of power sources, including a cost-sharing mechanism based on the electricity market trading to manage a time-step compensation fund. The objective is to address a common limitation in the implementation of environmental flows by reducing the dependence on government funding and the necessity for new arrangements. Compensation amounts can vary depending on ecosystem restoration goals (level of flow regime restoration), hydrological conditions, and hydropower sites characteristics. The application in the Paraná River Basin, Brazil, shows basin-wide compensation requirements ranging from zero in favorable hydrological years to thousands of dollars per gigawatt-hour generated in others. Each electricity consumer's contribution to the compensation fund is determined by their share of energy consumption, resulting in values ranging from cents for residential users to thousands of dollars for industrial facilities. Finally, the compensation fund signals the economic value of externalities in energy production. For residential users, achieving varying levels of ecosystem restoration led to an electricity bill increase of less than 1 %. For larger companies, the increase ranged from less than 1 %–12 %.
Refined operation of cascade reservoirs considering fish ecological demand
2022, Journal of Hydrology
Citation Excerpt :
Specifically, the refined design of the ecological operation release of reservoirs should integrate the key ecological demands into a continuum indicator. In the case of ecological operation experiments, it is clearly a location-specific problem (Horne et al., 2017b), so the design of environmental flow calls for multiple interactive effects beyond the simple correlations between flow variables and biological responses. For example, during the ecological operation process, because of the particularity of local hydrodynamic conditions in spawning grounds, the spawning behavior of the FMCC would not be stimulated by the flow increase in all river reaches.
Reservoir ecological operation creates artificial hydrological and hydrodynamic conditions to meet the demand of fish during key life periods, which provides eco-environmental protection to alleviate the negative impact of hydropower development on ecosystems. However, based on practical ecological operation experience, the flow experiments were rough in terms of plan design, most of which were implemented over short time frames, and circumstances where downstream flow conditions existed were inconsistent with fish requirements during periods affected by different local reservoir operation conditions. This finding suggests that current ecological operations leave considerable space for strategy refinement. This study proposed a methodology for designing refined operation strategies incorporating more ecological demands into reservoir operation releases to create and improve suitable ecological conditions for the spawning of representative fish species. A joint water quantity operation model of cascade reservoirs and an under dam-river hydrodynamic model coupling the operation conditions of hydroelectric generators was built. The proposed methodology was applied to the Three Gorges Dam (TGD) and Gezhouba (GZB) Dam cascade reservoirs in China. The simulation results indicated that (1) in most cases, the target of continuous flow increase on an hourly scale could be simply accomplished via hourly joint water quantity operation of TGD-GZB cascade reservoirs. (2) Maintenance of the average Dajiang and Erjiang generator output during the spawning period of Chinese sturgeon at a high outflow of 15000 m³/s could more effectively expand the integrated suitable space of Chinese sturgeon. We aimed to provide suggestions and references suitable for cascade reservoirs in China and worldwide to develop and optimize ecological operation conditions in more refined and diverse ways.
Is there enough water? How bearish and bullish outlooks are linked to decision maker perspectives on environmental flows
2021, Journal of Environmental Management
Citation Excerpt :
Second, in river basins where e-flows policies may be appropriate, what socio-political barriers constrain their implementation? The main obstacles to successful e-flows implementation are largely socio-political (Pahl-Wostl et al. 2013; Le Quesne et al. 2010; Richter 2010; Horne et al. 2017a, 2017b; Mezger et al. 2019). These include a lack of communication, support, and political will among stakeholders; insufficient funds, capacity, and expertise; and institutional and regulatory mandates that present conflicts of interest (Moore 2004; Hirji and Davis 2009; Opperman et al. 2018).
Policies that mandate environmental flows (e-flows) can be powerful tools for freshwater conservation, but implementation of these policies faces many hurdles. To better understand these challenges, we explored two key questions: (1) What additional data are needed to implement e-flows? and (2) What are the major socio-political barriers to implementing e-flows? We surveyed water and natural resource decision makers in the semi-arid Red River basin, Texas-Oklahoma, USA, and used social network analysis to analyze their communication patterns. Most respondents agreed that e-flows can provide important benefits and identified the same data needs. However, respondents sharply in their beliefs on other issues, and a clustering analysis revealed two distinct groups of decision makers. One cluster of decision makers tended to be bearish, or pessimistic, and believed that: current flow conditions are not adequate, there are many serious socio-political barriers to implementation, water conflicts will likely increase in the future, and climate change is likely to exacerbate these issues. The other cluster of respondents was bullish, or optimistic: they foresaw fewer future water conflicts and fewer socio-political barriers to implementation. Despite these differences, both clusters largely identified the same data needs and barriers to e-flows implementation. Our social network analysis revealed that the frequency of communication between clusters was not significantly different than the frequency of communication within clusters. Overall, our results suggest that the different perspectives of decision-makers could complicate efforts to implement e-flows and proactively plan for climate change. However, there are opportunities for collaboration on addressing common data needs and barriers to implementation. Overall, our study provides a key socio-environmental perspective on e-flows implementation from a semi-arid and socio-politically complex river basin and contextualizes the many challenges facing e-flows implementation in river basins globally.
An Electricity Market-Based Approach to Finance Environmental Flow Restoration
2023, SSRN
Poor correlation between large-scale environmental flow violations and freshwater biodiversity: implications for water resource management and the freshwater planetary boundary
2022, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences
The environmental flows implementation challenge: Insights and recommendations across water-limited systems
2022, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water

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Chapter 27 - Moving Forward: The Implementation Challenge for Environmental Water Management

Abstract