Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACTSince 1935, France has experienced an evolution ‐ from legislation aimed at groundwater protection to regulations concerning water‐management incentives for increased use, in selected parts of acquifers, without causing over‐abstraction. During the 1960s, the protection of users became the main priority, and the water agencies have now become powerful bodies in the combat against water pollution and towards aquifer rehabilitation. The 1992 Water Act provided a balanced management of water resources (a) taking into account the water resource, surface‐water and groundwater, and (b) establishing a Water Directorate within the Ministry of the Environment. Reference is made to major achievements in the field of groundwater management and protection in terms of quantity and quality.

Alexandra Fay (UCLA School of Law) has posted Toward a Tribal Role in Groundwater Management (11 American Indian Law Journal 1 (2023)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This Article considers the Agua Caliente groundwater litigation a decade since its...

AbstractFreshwater ecosystems provide a large number of benefits to society. However, extensive human activities threat the viability of these ecosystems, their habitats, and their dynamics and interactions. One of the main risks facing these systems is the overexploitation of groundwater resources that hinders the survival of several freshwater habitats. In this paper, we study optimal groundwater paths when considering freshwater ecosystems. We contribute to existing groundwater literature by including the possibility of regime shifts in freshwater ecosystems into a groundwater management problem. The health of the freshwater habitat, which depends on the groundwater level, presents a switch in its status that occurs when a critical water level ('tipping point') is reached. Our results highlight important differences in optimal extraction paths and optimal groundwater levels compared with traditional models. The outcomes suggest that optimal groundwater withdrawals are non-linear and depend on the critical threshold and the ecosystem's health function. Our results show that the inclusion of regime shifts in water management calls for a reformulation of water policies to incorporate the structure of ecosystems and their interactions with the habitat.

This chapter explores the case study of the Lower Murrumbidgee Groundwater Management Area in New South Wales, Australia. In particular, it illustrates the contours of two policy approaches for water entitlement reduction: one was a failure (unilateral reductions imposed uniformly on all water users); and one was a success (financial compensation for cutbacks in entitlements, negotiated in the shadow of court action). The long-standing problem of over-allocation in the Lower Murrumbidgee was addressed initially through a process of entitlement reduction, driven by the government and involving a heated and contested policy approach. The primary method of reduction was an approximate 50% cut to all entitlements (regardless of capital commitments). This was challenged by a group of groundwater irrigators in the Land and Environment Court, who preferred to regulate pumping by managing the water level within a sustainable bandwidth. Although the case was unsuccessful, the judge raised concerns about the fairness of the new arrangements, and the irrigators planned an appeal. The litigation and threat of an appeal proved a catalyst for cooperation amongst groundwater users across the state, producing a policy shift that saw the government pursue a program known as Achieving Sustainable Groundwater Entitlements. This program recognised historical extraction in calculating entitlement reduction, and provided financial assistance to licence holders. Overall, this case study illustrates important lessons for policy approaches for reducing entitlements, not least the need to account for local knowledge and concerns, as well as providing adjustment mechanisms (e.g. economic compensation) to ensure the long-term sustainable management of groundwater.

California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), passed in 2014, recognizes and addresses connections between surface water and groundwater. The statute is California's first statewide law to explicitly reflect the fact that surface water and groundwater are frequently interconnected and that groundwater management can impact groundwater-dependent ecosystems, surface water flows, and the beneficial uses of those flows. As such, SGMA partially remedies the historically problematic practice of treating groundwater and surface water as legally distinct resources. SGMA requires groundwater sustainability agencies (GSAs) to manage groundwater to avoid six undesirable results, including significant and unreasonable adverse impacts on beneficial uses of surface water. While this aspect of SGMA is clearly important, significant uncertainties exist regarding how GSAs will actually define and achieve this goal. Addressing SGMA's requirements for groundwatersurface water interactions will be difficult. Defining the issues at stake in any given basin, let alone successfully balancing the range of uncertainties and potentially conflicting interests, will pose challenges for many GSAs. No clear, pre-defined formula exists to guide GSAs in determining what significant and unreasonable depletions of interconnected surface water will be, or whether planned actions will sufficiently avoid them. Yet they are required to do so. Many GSAs will face pressure to aggressively address impacts on surface water in their basin. Many will face equal or greater pressure not to draw the line. Nevertheless, it will fall to the GSAs to make a determination, and to defend it in their groundwater sustainability plans (GSPs). Therefore, GSAs will likely take on some level of risk—of successful political opposition to their GSP, of succesful legal challenges to their GSP, of their GSP performing ineffectively, or of all of these outcomes. Given the aggressive timeline inherent to SGMA, addressing this risk early will be crucial for preserving management options. Challenges and risk are not the whole story, however. The process of addressing groundwater-surface water interactions also offers GSAs an opportunity to help communities and other stakeholders resolve, or avoid, difficult conflicts, and to do so in lasting ways. While California law has only recently begun to seriously address conflicts between surface and groundwater uses, those conflicts have been occurring for decades, and in some places for over a century. SGMA, in other words, did not create conflict between groundwater pumping and beneficial uses of surface water; instead it created an opportunity—as well as an obligation—to respond to those challenges. Embracing that opportunity will not be easy, but GSAs that take SGMA as an opportunity to resolve longstanding issues can do lasting good. The research presented here examines some of the legal and institutional questions that will inevitably arise as GSAs seek to address groundwater-surface water interactions under SGMA. The core goal of this report is to help parties identify and address these questions, and ultimately to let GSAs and stakeholders manage groundwater-surface water interactions proactively and effectively.