EurUP - Zeitschrift für Europäisches Umwelt- und Planungsrecht

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The search returned 2 results.

Kurt Faßbender

Zeitschrift für Europäisches Umwelt- und Planungsrecht, Volume 15 (2017), Issue 2, Page 152 - 166

The following paper presents and analyses current judgements of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and of German administrative courts dealing with the environmental objectives outlined in Article 4 of the Directive 2000/60/EC establishing a framework for Community action in the field of water policy (Water Framework Directive –WFD). From a European point of view, the most important recent decision is the judgement of May 4, 2016, concerning the authorisation of a hydropower plant on the Schwarze Sulm River in Austria where the CJEU concluded that the construction of such a plant may be an overriding public interest in the meaning of Article 4 (7) of the WFD. According to the Court, in that regard, the Member States must be allowed a certain margin of discretion for determining whether a specific project is of such interest. Furthermore, the Court stated that, contrary to the Commission’s assertions, the Austrian authorities did analyse the contested project as a whole, including its direct and indirect impact on the objectives of Directive 2000/60, and weighed up the advantages of the project with its negative impact on the status of the body of surface water of the Schwarze Sulm. Thus, according to the CJEU all the conditions for a derogation from the objective to prevent deterioration of the status of bodies of surface water were taken into account and were rightly considered to be met.

Eva Julia Lohse

Zeitschrift für Europäisches Umwelt- und Planungsrecht, Volume 15 (2017), Issue 2, Page 141 - 151

The EU Water Framework Directive not only pursues the goal to safeguard waterbodies and clean drinking water by legal means but demands the introduction of economically informed instruments in its Art. 9. So far, Germany had not implemented Art. 9 on the federal level, but has relied on water levies in the Länder (German “states”) for this purpose. This paper explores whether the newly introduced § 6a Wasserhaushaltsgesetz (Federal Water Resource Management Act) has set new standards for the fulfilment of the demands of European Union law by defining the cost recovery principle. It also looks into the problems posed by the merging of two systems for behavioural governance: law and economics – trying to console their different ideas within the interpretation of terms such as “water users” and “water services”.

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