Water Resources Allocation and Agriculture: Transitioning from Open to Regulated Access
The book brings together a range of leading scholars and practitioners to compile an international account of water allocation policies supporting a transition to sustainable water use in regions where agriculture is the dominant water use. In Section 1, the collection canvasses five key cross-cutting issues shaping the challenge of sustainable water allocation policy, such as legal and economic perspectives, the role of politics, the setting of environmental flows, and the importance of indigenous rights. Section 2 presents 13 national, state and transboundary case studies of water allocation policy, covering cases from Europe, the Americas, Central Asia, the Middle East and the Pacific region. These case studies highlight novel and innovative elements of water allocation regimes, which respond to the cross-cutting issues addressed in Section 1, as well as local challenges and social and environmental imperatives. The book provides a comprehensive account of water allocation in a range of international settings and provides a reference point for practitioners and scholars worldwide wishing to draw on the latest advances on how to design and implement sustainable water allocation systems.
ISBN: 9781789062779 (print)
ISBN: 9781789062786 (eBook)
ISBN: 9781789062793 (ePUB)
Chapter 7: England and Wales: countering ‘unsustainable abstraction’ with the catchment based approach
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Published:August 2022
David Benson, Hadrian Cook, M. Yasir Ak, Burcin Demirbilek, 2022. "England and Wales: countering ‘unsustainable abstraction’ with the catchment based approach", Water Resources Allocation and Agriculture: Transitioning from Open to Regulated Access, Josselin Rouillard, Christina Babbitt, Edward Challies, Jean-Daniel Rinaudo
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Abstract
England and Wales have a long-established abstraction licensing regime for determining water allocations amongst economic sectors, particularly agriculture. This regime is implemented by the Environment Agency (EA) and Natural Resources Wales (NRW), primarily through Catchment Abstraction Management Strategies (CAMS) and attendant Abstraction Licensing Strategies (ALS), to support policy requirements for environmental sustainability. Over time, water licensing has been increasingly linked to water availability in catchments while licence trading now provides greater flexibility in allocations. Ongoing reforms will further seek to integrate resource sustainability and the catchment based approach (CaBA) to management into this evolving regime. Yet a critical question concerns whether such policy commitments to countering ‘unsustainable abstraction’ have been achieved, particularly by the agricultural sector. Here, we define sustainability in terms of the environmental, social and economic outcomes of governance.