Towards a program of measures in the context of the European Water framework Directive

Abstract

In the European Water Framework Directive [1] the concepts underlying the management of the EU-waters are described. Attention is paid to many aspects such as the administration, emissions, objectives and monitoring. For each river basin these topics should be condensed in a river basin plan. The contents of such a river basin plan are described in Appendix VII of the EU Water Framework Directive and contain 11 topics. One of the topics is the plan of measures. In this paper the coherence between the topics of a river basin plan and the plan of measures is explored and is applied to the Elbe River in Germany. Towards river basin management plans for all European rivers In 2000 the European Commission accepted the European Water Framework Directive [1]. This directive formulates that plans for River Basin Management should be developed for each of the European Rivers. For the contents of these plans 11 requirements are formulated. The first part of the plan should be finished by 2004 while the plans should be operational by 2012. The requirements for a River Basin Management Plan, mentioned in the next paragraph, serve a number of administrative, legal and technical purposes. Each of these purposes requires different data and information. In the present paper the coherence between the 11 requirements is investigated from the point of view of one of the EU requirements “a summaty of the programme of measures, including how the (environmental) objectives must be achieved”. To that extent first the 11 requirements will be subdivided into 9 requirements which have a technical nature and 2 requirements which serve the consultation © 2002 WIT Press, Ashurst Lodge, Southampton, SO40 7AA, UK. All rights reserved. Web: www.witpress.com Email witpress@witpress.com Paper from: Hydraulic Information Management, CA Brebbia and WR Blain (Editors). ISBN 1-85312-912-7 410 Ilu[lwlllic /11/0 )’11/(llioll [Wlqyl?letl[ with the public. It will be shown that the 9 requirements with more technical nature can be fitted into elements or questions of a problem solving approach: ● What are problems in the river basin and who are the actors? ● What is the present state of the river basin ● What is the desired state of the river basin ● What are feasible measures’? ● What are the impacts of the measures on the present state of the basin? ● Which set of measures approaches the desired state satisfactorily? ● What are external factors influencing the state of the river basin? ● Is there sufficient administrative and public support for the selected measures? For the program of measures, the 9 EU requirements should not be regarded independent from each other, but the accuracy as well as the spatial and temporal resolution of data and models related to each requirement should be coherent. This point is elaborated in the paragraph on the design of the information system. In addition to the necessity of being coherent, the degree of accuracy also depends on the phase of the systems analysis, see e.g. Miser and Quade [2]: problem deftition, development of feasible measures, building and using models to analyse the effectiveness of the measures and ranking and selection of a set of measures. For instance in the problem deftition phase the data and know-ledge is less detailed than in the phase of using models to analyse the effects of a set of measures. As the development of a River Basin management plan for the Elbe River is very complex, the development of a Decision Support System was envisaged. An important by-product of the development of such a system is that it helps to structure the discussion between the actors. The Decision Support System presented in this paper is designed for impact assessment and evaluation, i.e. two steps in the systems analysis. The definition of Decision Support Systems has called for many discussions (Mallach [3]). We will use the term DSS in this paper as defined by Keen [4]: a computer system with the aim to assist managers in their decision processes in semi-structured tasks, support, rather than replace, managerial judgement and improve the effectiveness of decision making rather than its efficiency. Such a system should support the following functions: anafjwis of management alternatives communication among scientists and decision makers as well as the public management. fimction library fimction The design of the DSS should be open and sufficiently flexible to allow for the incorporation of more complex models if necessary, Furthermore, a pilot DSS should be generic and applicable for the management of other river basins in Germany and abroad. © 2002 WIT Press, Ashurst Lodge, Southampton, SO40 7AA, UK. All rights reserved. Web: www.witpress.com Email witpress@witpress.com Paper from: Hydraulic Information Management, CA Brebbia and WR Blain (Editors). ISBN 1-85312-912-7