A Bird’s Eye View of the Greek Water Situation: The Potential for the Implementation of the EU WFD
Summary (2 min read)
Introduction
- Chapter 1: A Bird’s Eye View of the Greek Water Situation: The Potential for the Implementation of the EU WFD.
- Whereas previously adopted water-related EU Directives addressed individual issues, the WFD aims to provide an integrated framework for water resources management, both in terms of quality and quantity, to achieve the objective of good water status for all EU waters.
- Potential gaps in relation to the environmental objectives should be identified.
- The most important economic concept that the Directive introduces, is that of water resources management based on the recovery of the total economic cost of water services such as freshwater provision to domestic uses and irrigation, urban wastewater collection and treatment by the Sewerage Services and recycled water supply to irrigation.
- The identification of significant pressures and impacts, which derives from the analysis of pressure and impacts Geographical and qualitative assessment of the various water uses (agricultural, industrial, domestic) in the regions of each RBD Estimation of socio-economic significance of water uses Identification of protected areas with species that present high economical value 5.
As far as the agricultural sector is concerned the 40% of Greece’s irrigation needs are
- Covered by the 404 operating Local Irrigation Companies, which are responsible for the abstraction and distribution of water.
- The construction of major irrigation plants is undertaken by the General Irrigation Companies operating in 10 river basin districts.
- Prices are set by irrigation companies based on private cost criteria.
- Table 3 presents the overall socio-economic characterization of the RBDs.
- Socio-economic identity of the RBDs River Basin District Primary Sector (% GDP) Secondary Sector (% GDP) Tertiary Sector (% GDP), also known as Table 3.
14: Aegean
- According to the information/data provided by the National Management Program of water inventory of the Hellenic Ministry of the Environment, Physical Planning and Public Works, the river basins are distinguished according to the conditions of water quality to: 1. Good 2. Moderate 3. Bad.
- For the RBDs where financial data were not available for all enterprises, the total financial cost was approximated assuming for the remaining enterprises the Greek mean financial cost per enterprise and aggregating over all operating enterprises.
6.2 Environmental cost
- The environmental cost refers to the cost associated with water quality depletion and thus the subsequent limitation of water resources’ capacity to provide goods and services which can be translated to value for people.
- To calculate the environmental damage arising from water supply or discharge, a variety of valuation techniques developed by economists can be applied which are generally classified as revealed preference techniques (see for example Braden and Kolstad, 1991) and stated preference techniques (see for example Adamowicz et al., 1998).
- The resource cost was calculated for the water districts of Aegean Islands, East Sterea Ellada, Thessaly and East Peloponnesos, where water demand surpasses supply as indicated by their water balance.
- When both the total economic cost and the revenues from charges to users were identified for each use in every RBD the cost recovery level was calculated as:.
- The above estimates should be regarded as broad estimates of the true recovery level, the calculation of which would be expensive and extremely difficult to conduct in the short term.
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Cites background from "A Bird’s Eye View of the Greek Wate..."
...With respect to weather conditions, Martínez-Espiñeira (2002) (Northwest Spain) has found that water use was highest in summer. In addition, Martínez-Espiñeira (2002) and Schleich and Hillenbrand (2009) (for Germany) have found that water consumption decreases as the number of rainy days increases....
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...With respect to weather conditions, Martínez-Espiñeira (2002) (Northwest Spain) has found that water use was highest in summer....
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14 citations
Cites background from "A Bird’s Eye View of the Greek Wate..."
...Investigation 6 [Koundouri et al., 2014] Koundouri et al. [2014] estimated the cost of natural resources for Thessaly, i.e. the component of water pricing, which is linked to the present or future shortage due to the overexploitation of water resources beyond the renewal rate approximately at 90…...
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References
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