Tuula Honkonen 1
5 Concluding remarks
The EU Water Framework Directive and the Floods Directive have led to the need to amend or supplement many, if not most, of the existing transboundary water agree-ments in Europe. This has been necessary to make the agreeagree-ments comply with the new concepts and obligations presented by these directives, such as the objective of a good ecological status of the waters, the development of coordinated management plans and programmes of measures, and coordination in respect of flood/drought
118 Kaatra, ‘Outcomes of Vuoksi River’, supra note 108, at 68.
119 Per Stålnacke and Gulnara Roll, ‘Lake Peipsi: A Transboundary Lake on the Future Border of the European Union’ in Lars Hedegaard and Bjarne Lindström (eds), The NEBI (North European and Baltic Sea Integration) Yearbook 2001/2002 (Springer, 2002) 159–178 at 174.
120 See Gulnara Roll et al, ‘Lake Peipsi/Chudskoe. Experience and Lessons Learned Brief’, Third World Water Forum (2006) 335–346 at 340.
The Role of EU Water Directives in Promoting Transboundary Water Cooperation and Water Security through Water Agreements – with a Special Focus on Finland
prevention and control.121 The transboundary water agreements to which Finland is a party are no exception to this. The agreements with neighboring countries that have a similar obligation to implement the Directives (i.e. Sweden and Norway) have been significantly updated or supplemented with new regulations in order to fulfill the requirements of the EU water law. The Agreement with Russia has not seen a similar development for an obvious reason (Russia being a non-EU country). How-ever, even under that Agreement, discussions have begun regarding the adoption of some measures from the sphere of the EU water directives. Russia does not have any legal obligation regarding this kind of effort, but clearly perceives the WFD, or at least some elements thereof, as a potentially effective and useful instrument for fresh-water management.
It has been assessed that the general efficiency of international freshwater commis-sions has been increased by the WFD approach.122 That sounds to be a reasonable conclusion. The commissions benefit from the increased cooperation and coordina-tion of the nacoordina-tional water administracoordina-tion authorities and they are often engaged in the preparation of joint management practices and instruments.
Overall, the EU Water Framework Directive commits Member States to the same objectives in their freshwater management and to coordinated planning and imple-mentation of management in shared river basins. Member States are individually responsible for the proper implementation of the water directives and, at the same time, strongly committed to cooperation with fellow Member State riparian coun-tries. The commitment to cooperation with the non-Member States sharing the ba-sin is not quite as strong, but there has been an emerging trend to also engage these countries more strongly in cooperative arrangements. Sometimes, this initiative has come from the non-Member State, as evidenced, for instance, by the case of the Finn-ish-Russian cooperation.
The fact that the role of existing treaty arrangements and their governing bodies (commissions) has been reinforced by the EU water directives also has implications for improved water security in the area of the Union and beyond. The directives allow and encourage the participation of all riparian countries, including non-EU Member States, in the preparation of assessments and regulatory measures and in the actual implementation of genuinely joint freshwater management in shared basins. Then again, active cooperation with non-Member States is only encouraged by the direc-tives and so the level of regulation remains rather weak. In any case, early and active involvement of all riparians is apt to reduce water-related conflicts among states, es-pecially through effective sharing of information and a sense of participation in the process and influencing the outcomes of the joint management scheme.
121 INBO, ‘WFD contributions to water’, supra note 36, at 4.
122 Ibid.
Finland has traditionally had open and reliable relations with Sweden and Norway, including in the management of shared freshwater resources. The recently adopted agreements and the implementation of the EU water directives more generally with-in this context will ensure that the potential for freshwater-related conflict situations will be further reduced among these states. With regard to the cooperation with Rus-sia on frontier waters, the influence of EU water directives has naturally been of much less significance. Nevertheless, the future is looking interesting, as Russia has been indicating its willingness to adopt elements from the relevant EU legislation into its freshwater management regulation.123 The current Finnish-Russian regime has been cited as being one of the success stories of international water law,124 and the inte-gration of relevant pieces of the EU water directives into that scheme of cooperation will certainly not weaken the regime’s effectiveness.
123 See, for instance, Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, ‘Russia’ in Sigrid Hedin et al, The Water Framework Directive in the Baltic Sea Region Countries – Vertical Implementation, Horizontal Integration and Transnational Cooperation, Nordregio Report 2007:2, available at <https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/
diva2:700419/FULLTEXT01.pdf> (visited 12 October 2015) 131–137 at 134.
124 Antti Belinskij, ‘Cooperation between Finland and the Russian Federation’ in Attila Tanzi, Owen McIntyre, Alexandros Kolliopoulos and Alistair Rieu–Clarke (eds), The UNECE Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes: Its Contribution to International Water Cooperation (Brill, 2015) 310–315. This is also how the parties themselves view it. See Minna Hanski, ‘Reconciling flood protection and energy in the transboundary cooperation on water management between Finland and the Russian Federation’, a presentation in a UNECE Workshop on Transboundary Water Cooperation 11–12 June 2013, Buenos Aires, Argentina, available at <http://www.unece.org/
fileadmin/DAM/env/documents/2012/wat/workshops/Latin_American_workshop_in_Buenos_
Aires/3.3.Minna_Hanski_FiRuCooperation_En.pdf> (visited 13 August 2015), slide 11.
w ater - related C onFliCt and s eCurity in s outhern a FriCa : t he sadC p rotoCol on s hared
w aterCourses
Ed Couzens
11 Introduction
Southern Africa (the SADC region – Southern African Development Community)2 is one of the most arid regions in the world, with many of its countries being wa-ter-stressed or in places even water-scarce.3 All central and most southern African countries are considered water-scarce – those that are not water-scarce are either
‘approaching water-scarcity’ or have not been estimated.4 The region is also one of those with the greatest imperatives for rapid economic growth in order to lift its in-habitants from poverty. The region is currently heavily dependent on coal for
elec-1 Associate Professor, The University of Sydney, Sydney Law School, Australia; BA Hons LLB (Wits) LLM Environmental Law (Natal & Nottingham) PhD (KZN); Attorney of the High Court, RSA. E-mail:
ed.couzens@sydney.edu.au. The author has participated in the research project ‘Legal framework to pro-mote water security’ (WATSEC), financed by the Academy of Finland (268151). NOTE: This paper underwent a formal anonymous review process, through two anonymous reviewers. The reports of these reviewers, and any relevant further correspondence, are kept on file with the two editors who were not involved in the writing of this paper. FURTHER NOTE: The author of this paper wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers, whose input improved the writing of this paper.
2 The SADC comprises 15 member states: Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, the Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, the United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. See <http://www.sadc.int/>.
3 According to the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), a water-stressed area is one in which annual water supply drops below 1 700m3 per person, a water-scarce area is one in which the supply drops below 1,000m3 per person, and ‘absolute scarcity’ means a supply of less than 500m3 per person. UNDESA, ‘International Decade for Action “WATER FOR LIFE” 2005–2015’ (24 November 2014), <http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/scarcity.shtml> (visited 8 November 2015).
4 Ibid. See map drawn from World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP), ‘World Water Development Report 4’ (March 2012), available at <http://www.unesco.org/new/en/natural-sciences/environment/
water/wwap/wwdr/wwdr4-2012/> (visited 8 November 2015).
Water-related Conflict and Security in Southern Africa:
The SADC Protocol on Shared Watercourses
tricity production, with the various problems associated with mining and burning coal. Hydro-electric power, which has been used as a particular focus in this paper, has the potential to provide an alternative, but does come with many problems of its own.5 Amongst these are potential conflicts between the users of watercourses shared between southern African states. According to Meissner, ‘many scholars and practitioners are convinced that water will, in the future, lead to violent conflict in many parts of the world’ with ‘[r]egions that are pronounced to develop “water wars”
includ[ing] the Middle East and southern Africa’.6
The role of the SADC’s Revised Protocol on Shared Watercourses7 is considered.
While the aim of the Revised Protocol is to further cooperation, there are some warning signs that some SADC member states might be taking a wary approach toward it. This can be seen in the paucity of references to the Revised Protocol in the political bickering over high-profile examples of regional water-related conflict; and in the failure of most members to ratify the 1997 UN Convention on International Watercourses,8 which is now in force, even though the Revised Protocol was designed to reflect the provisions of this Convention.