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INTRODUCTION
The Water Framework Directive ( WFD) establishes a framework for the management and protection of Europe's water resources. The WEWS Act, which transposed the Directive into Scots law, made the Scottish Environment Protection Agency ( SEPA) the competent authority for implementing and ensuring compliance with the Directive in Scotland. This includes responsibility for the preparation of River Basin Management Plans for managing our water environment.
The Plans will be developed through a 6-year cyclical process that will define appropriate environmental objectives for all water bodies in Scotland and set out measures to ensure that these objectives are met. In developing these Plans, we will aim to strike the right balance between protecting and improving the water environment and other social, economic and environmental needs.
The WFD requires us to set environmental objectives to protect the whole aquatic ecosystem. This brings a need to focus on the health of the plants and animals in the water environment, and not just the quality and chemistry of the water itself. It also requires that water bodies are not considered in isolation, but also in relation to other water bodies in a river basin district.
The WFD has two key objectives for all water bodies: - to prevent deterioration of the status of all surface water and groundwater bodies; and
- to protect, enhance and restore all bodies of surface water and groundwater with the aim of achieving 'good ecological and chemical status' in all surface water and 'good chemical and quantitative status' in groundwaters by 2015.
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The Water Environment (Controlled Activities) Regulations 2005 ( CAR), which were introduced earlier this year, will be a key tool in securing the protection and improvement of our water environment. These Regulations task SEPA with regulating activities which could pose a risk to the water environment, such as abstractions, impoundments, discharges and engineering works in freshwater. SEPA may impose authorisation conditions as needed to limit the risk of deterioration of status; to make improvements to the state of the water environment; to protect the interests of other users or to retain an appropriate level of environmental capacity for future sustainable development.
In order to set appropriate conditions, SEPA and other regulators must have robust standards that define the conditions needed to protect aquatic ecosystems. These include standards for water quality, water levels and flow conditions, chemical pollutants and the physical structure and condition of water bodies and shore zones. Since the natural characteristics and sensitivity of plants and animals vary between different water bodies, standards are being developed to reflect the different requirements of ecology in rivers, lochs, transitional (estuarine) and coastal waters. Smaller scale variations in ecology between different rivers are also taken into account. Separate standards are being developed for groundwaters.
The standards that are proposed in this paper have been developed on a UK-wide basis by technical experts using the best available scientific evidence. The standards and the methodology used to derive them have been subject to peer review. This approach provides us with a robust basis for identifying the specific numerical standards needed to protect our water environment.
This consultation paper presents proposals for the first set of UK environmental standards and conditions under the WFD. It gives information on the development of further standards ( section B) and sets out more generally how environmental standards will be used in Scotland ( section C). Section E summarises initial estimates of the potential costs and benefits associated with the first phase of standards. These first proposed numerical standards are set out in Annex A.
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