Is the Achievement of “Good Status” for German Surface Waters Disproportionately Expensive?—Comparing Two Approaches to Assess Disproportionately High Costs in the Context of the European Water Framework Directive

Abstract

Currently only 8.2% of German surface water bodies have reached the goal of the European Water Framework Directive to bring all water into a "good status". For all water bodies that presumably will not achieve the objective by 2027, the member states have to justify an exemption by 2021, for example, by arguing that the costs of achieving "good status" would be "disproportionately high". In this paper, two approaches for assessing cost-disproportionality of surface water bodies are empirically tested and compared on a set of real-world data from a German federal state. In the first approach, called average cost approach, costs are considered as being disproportionately high if they are significantly higher than what would be a "relatively normal effort". The core idea of the second, the benchmark approach, is to take the past public expenditures on water management as a basis for comparison. Both approaches include generated utility for determination of a water-body-specific disproportionality threshold. While the benchmarking approach needs less data, the empirical tests indicate that both approaches yield comparable results and are suitable to support authorities in the decision as to which water bodies are to be considered disproportionately expensive such that exemptions are justified.

Economic Analysis under the Water Framework Directive: The State of the Art and Way forward

“…The so-called "New Leipzig approach" or benchmark approach is a procedure developed by Klauer et al [7] and tested on a group of seven water bodies in Germany, then on of the entire water bodies of a German federal state [72], in a river basin in the Czech Republic [70], and a Spanish river basin [68]. It is worth saying that the benchmark approach has also been taken as a reference methodology in the Italian national guidelines for the assessment of disproportionated costs of WFD measures [80].…”

“…There are some differences between these different applications but the core idea of this approach is to determine for each water body (or group of water bodies) a specific disproportionality threshold that is compared to the costs to achieve the WFD's objectives [7]. Klauer et al [7,72] clarify that some preliminary steps are required to conduct this analysis, which are the calculation of the national average past expenditure on water protection normalized for the river basin/catchment area and an appraisal of the costs of measures. After that, the method foresees the creation of a parameter called the Effort Factor (EF), which identifies the additional effort that is required for the achievement of the good state objective for each water body or group of water bodies.…”