The Ebro River Basin Authority and the 2014 Basin Plan

September 16th, 2014

Rogelio Galván Plaza & Manuel Omedas Margelí, Ebro River Basin Authority, Zaragoza, Spain

When the Ebro River Basin Authority (Confederación Hidrográfica del Ebro – CHE) was established in 1926 the first institution of this kind in the world it incorporated two elements which were radically innovative at the time: (i) the natural watershed boundaries as the scale for water governance and (ii) water users’ opinions as part of the decision making process.

In arid and semi-arid areas, where the lack of water availability is a limiting factor for development, the exploitation and use of water have always required a high degree of community involvement, often leading to the formation of collective resource management organizations. In Spain, since the Middle Ages  when water shortages led to the absolute need for collective decision-making and adequate water allocation to different irrigators  users organized themselves creating communities of users, real parapublic entities in charge of building diversion dams and acequias (community operated artificial watercourses), organizing irrigation scheduling and maintenance, collecting fees from the community members, or penalizing the misuse of water via special irrigation tribunals.

River basin organizations in Spain, such as the Ebro River Basin Authority, were born as a new symbiosis between the private and public spheres. These user communities were brought together under single public institutions, where they could elect their representatives and influence decisions that affected them. Today there are more than 2000 user communities represented in the Ebro River Basin Authority, protected both in water laws and in the Ebro River Basin Authority. This structure means that all conflicts between users, even during times of drought, are minimized and resolved via appropriate discussions and negotiations. The 1985 Water Act articulated and reinforced this collective management dimension by opening up participation to other stakeholders, particularly Spain’s Autonomous Communities (regions) and civil society, and since the European Water Framework Directive adopted in 2000, active participation has been further encouraged and extended to multiple stakeholders.

Moreover, water scarcity also required harmonious planning and management at the watershed scale to: (1) enable the identification of the most efficient solutions for the entire basin, (2) allow for the development and implementation of policies not achievable by local private or public initiative and (3) overcome arbitrary administrative boundaries. Therefore river basin authorities were created as effective watershed scale governance organizations since their inception and were also linked to the planning and to the realization of a shared vision of water management within the naturally defined boundaries of the basin.

Today, the Ebro River Basin Authority is an autonomous body although legally it is an administrative unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment 70% self-financed through the collection of fees and charges to water users and polluters, embodying the paradigm of Integrated Water Resources Management. The Ebro River Basin Authority has multiple responsibilities under Spain’s water law: water quality and ecological status management; wastewater discharges authorization and control; environmental restoration activities; water use licensing, authorization and control; construction and operation of infrastructure; prevention and management of floods and droughts. The same water law defined the need for a River Basin Management Plan to serve as a regulatory reference and as a road-map for future water management actions. The first River Basin Management Plan was approved in 1998 and recently (February 28, 2014) the second plan was approved and framed within the requirements of the European Water Framework Directive.

The 2014 River Basin Management Plan aims to achieve good ecological status of water bodies in the basin, preserving and restoring the river environments that were significantly damaged in the 1960s and 1970s, and at the same time retain water’s capacity to generate wealth, particularly as a basis for preserving the Ebro basin agri-food system’s role as one of the most important food producing areas in Europe. All of this within the complexity added by water scarcity, which makes planning even more necessary.

The 2014 Ebro Basin Management Plan, like any plan, is above all a combined societal effort in favor of a collective project. Therefore, during the Plan preparation stages the River Basin Authority interacted not only with stakeholders that traditionally have interest in the planning process, but also with other stakeholders traditionally excluded from water planning decisions, so as to represent interests from different sectors of society.

A participatory process was performed at the sub-catchment scale, resulting in over 120 meetings of 1,609 representatives from 1,205 different organizations and entities, each one making ??their case and proposing management actions, for a total of 7,000 comments and contributions during the meetings plus 500 comments in writing, all of which can be consulted on River Basin Authority’s website. This process also included a basin-wide call of representatives of the major economic actors and citizen groups in the basin. Municipalities, water utilities, irrigators, hydropower representatives, businesses, recreational users, environmentalists, and researchers, institutions took part in this process.

The participatory process culminates in the Water Council for the demarcation of the Ebro, a formal participatory body regulated by law, which has 93 members distributed as follows:

15 members representing various ministries

5 members representing the River Basin Authority

34 members representing the different Autonomous regions located within the Ebro basin

3 members representing local administrative bodies

32 members representing water users (water utilities, irrigators, hydropower, other uses)

2 members representing agricultural associations

2 members representing environmental organizations

One member representing business associations

One member representing labor organizations

2 members with the right to participate and voice their concerns but without the right to vote, on behalf of recreational users.

The Water Council met several times throughout the development of the Management Plan and ultimately approved the Ebro Basin Management Plan on July 4, 2013, with 72 votes in favor, 9 votes against and 5 abstentions, achieving a broad consensus beyond extreme or partial positions. The Ebro Basin Management Plan was finally approved by the Government on February 28, 2014.

Water management in the Ebro River Basin Authority is carried out in close contact with society, and especially water users, which gives them ability to influence decisions. The Management Plan, following this idea of empowering participation, has collected all of society’s requests and interests, which have been responsibly assimilated and prioritized by their representatives on the Water Council, and in turn by the National Government.

References:

The Ebro River Basin Plan (2014) can be downloaded here.

Rogelio Galvan Plaza is the head of the hydrological planning office at the Ebro River Basin Authority. He is a civil engineer and also holds a degree in history. He has 16 years of experience working on water planning and IWRM in the Ebro basin. He was involved in the implementation of the European Water Framework Directive and of the Ebro Basin Management Plan. He is also in charge of international projects and partnerships. He was director of international courses and networks of water managers and river basin planners. Manuel Omedas Margelí has been working at the Ebro River Basin Authority as the Head of Water Planning since 2005.He holds degrees in Political Science, Sociology and Civil Engineering, Manuel Omedas is a specialist in integrated water management in river basins. He has 30 years of experience working in the Ebro River Basin, and has seen first-hand the legal, socio-economic and technical challenges of managing of the largest river in Spain. He has authored numerous publications and presentations on water management.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.