Water Quality Is a Poor Predictor of Recreational Hotspots in England.

Maintaining and improving water quality is key to the protection and restoration of aquatic ecosystems, which provide important benefits to society. In Europe, the Water Framework Directive (WFD) defines water quality based on a set of biological, hydro-morphological and chemical targets, and aims to reach good quality conditions in all river bodies by the year 2027. While recently it has been argued that achieving these goals will deliver and enhance ecosystem services, in particular recreational services, there is little empirical evidence demonstrating so. Here we test the hypothesis that good water quality is associated with increased utilization of recreational services, combining four surveys covering walking, boating, fishing and swimming visits, together with water quality data for all water bodies in eight River Basin Districts (RBDs) in England. We compared the percentage of visits in areas of good water quality to a set of null models accounting for population density, income, age distribution, travel distance, public access, and substitutability. We expect such association to be positive, at least for fishing (which relies on fish stocks) and swimming (with direct contact to water). We also test if these services have stronger association with water quality relative to boating and walking alongside rivers, canals or lakeshores. In only two of eight RBDs (Northumbria and Anglian) were both criteria met (positive association, strongest for fishing and swimming) when comparing to at least one of the null models. This conclusion is robust to variations in dataset size. Our study suggests that achieving the WFD water quality goals may not enhance recreational ecosystem services, and calls for further empirical research on the connection between water quality and ecosystem services.

Mind the costs: rescaling and multi-level environmental governance in Venice lagoon.

Competences over environmental matters are distributed across agencies at different scales on a national-to-local continuum. This article adopts a transaction costs economics perspective in order to explore the question whether, in the light of a particular problem, the scale at which a certain competence is attributed can be reconsidered. Specifically, it tests whether a presumption of least-cost operation concerning an agency at a given scale can hold. By doing so, it investigates whether the rescaling of certain tasks, aiming at solving a scale-related problem, is likely to produce an increase in costs for day-to-day agency operations as compared to the status quo. The article explores such a perspective for the case of Venice Lagoon. The negative aspects of the present arrangement concerning fishery management and morphological remediation are directly linked to the scale of the agencies involved. The analysis suggests that scales have been chosen correctly, at least from the point of view of the costs incurred to the agencies involved. Consequently, a rescaling of those agencies does not represent a viable option.