A - OVERVIEW: ENVIRONMENTAL STANDARDS AND THE WEWS ACT
The aim of the WEWS Act is to protect and improve the water environment while also supporting the social and economic interests of those who depend upon it.
To achieve this, the water environment must be looked at on a larger, river basin scale, rather than as individual rivers or lochs. Over the next few years, the process of River Basin Management Planning will begin. This is a risk-based process to manage water resources in each river basin district. This process will set environmental objectives for each water body and design programmes of measures to deliver them.
As all activities that pose a risk to the water environment are now regulated in Scotland under CAR, it is vital that any licence conditions set by SEPA reflect appropriate standards, in order to help deliver the environmental objectives set through the basin planning process.
Both regulation and basin planning will be supported by the environmental standards and conditions, which will allow SEPA to assess the current status of the water environment, and therefore to determine what actions are needed to meet our environmental objectives. Standards will also be used to monitor the status of waters, and to assess the effectiveness of measures aimed at their improvement. Thus the introduction of these environmental standards is a key step in our implementation of the WFD in Scotland.
The uses of environmental standards fall into four areas:
- Classification of water bodies - assessing their current and ongoing status;
- Objective-setting within river basin management planning;
- Regulation of water use under CAR; and
- Monitoring the achievement of our environmental objectives.
These areas are discussed in more detail below.