中欧社会论坛 - China Europa ForumWater resources management in France based on solidarity
The example of the rhône méditerranée & corse basins
Authors: Laurent Fayein & François Guerber
French river basin organizations such as the Rhône-Méditerranée & Corse (RM&C) Water Agency have been practising Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) for more than forty years : watershed area of intervention, across administrative traditional territories ; monitoring and objectives for coastal, surface and ground water resources ; information and decision process concerning the projects and involving the water stakeholders of the whole society : municipalities, industries, agriculture, tourism ; economic instruments.
Methodologies and practises have been improved on the basis of the successes or the failures of every six-year plan. But the system is being deeply revived, spurred on by the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) : the objective is now (i) to involve the public and water stakeholders in the highly ambitious recovering of (ii) an « ecological » status for all water bodies, within 2015, (iii) consistent with economic development and risk assessments.
In order to reach this new objective, the Water Agencies actions will have to be funded, even more than up to now, on ethic aspects linked with the three items strengthened by the WFD:
(i)Public participation and water actors decision process. The production and delivery of information about water resources situation, pressures (abstractions, discharges, hydraulic modifications,…) on water bodies, impacts of different projects will be developed with the utmost transparency and will be the basis for concerted decisions about water policy, environmental priorities and financing. Different manners of raising awareness, dialogue or implication and decisions will be used, depending on the type of interlocutor: general public, pupils, NGOS, water actors, decision-makers.
(ii)Ecological status. The objective is no longer limited to the quantity and the quality of waters but includes natural hydro morphology and flow regimes of rivers, wetlands and fauna. The modesty in front of the complexity of Nature and in front of the uncertainty of Future is a more useful principle than pride and arrogance.
(iii) Socio-economic instruments – The polluter-payer principle is fundamental to gather the financial means that will allow the IWRM to be efficient. But it is also a non expensive instrument which is broadly-accepted because funded on justice.
All these ethic aspects can be summarized by the principle of solidarity: between upstream and downstream water actors; between individual and collective interests, between present and future population.