Introduction of new techniques, measures, and approaches (like small retention facilities), will influence private property and need efficient public-private partnership. Private landowners usually look into costs, benefits and possible effects any approach may have, and it all comes down to one question: Why would I want to pay for that? Normally, private sector engagement in adaptation assures greater investments and services in core development sectors (Biagini and Miller 2013). Community involvement and private-public partnerships can be powerful mechanisms in coping with floods (Chartres and Noble 2015) but also other natural disasters. Transformational change and policy vision are a prerequisite for a successful implementation of science-driven natural or technical measures. Obviously, extreme events will become more severe and frequent. In this case, small retention facilities could be "a bright spot" for forest managers and policy makers in other countries who will use this example and incorporate it in existing management of forest resources. Land and forest management carries a great deal of importance in addressing current risks that are accentuated by climate change impacts; this is also stated in IPCC reports (2012). However, sustainable forest management and the prevention and mitigation of floods, droughts, and wildfires, are still not perceived as an important endeavor in developing and post-conflict countries with weak socio-economic conditions (Kapovi´c Solomun et al. 2018). Under these circumstances, the forest- and land-related legislative framework is usually adequate and includes "sustainability", but the resources for implementation are limited. Likewise, the pros and cons of centralized forest management are an argument worth consideration within countryspecific circumstances. For instance, centralized forest governance and prevalence of public forests in countries with a high level of corruption and weak implementation of legislative frameworks does not usually lead to good forest stewardship. Sometimes, such centralized power can serve as an open channel for corruption among forest managers; this often leads to the exaggerated use and future decrease of forest quality, decreased interception and evapotranspiration, soil storage capacity, all of which increases the possibility for flooding and landslides as well. Furthermore, fire is understood as a natural factor, but wild fires are often threats to forests, public safety and property (Martell 2007), endangering biodiversity and land. This phenomenon is also frequently caused by humans and made more likely due to climate change. With all of this in mind, small retention facilities in the forests are potential solutions to these problems that need to be supported with continuous education and by raising awareness in communities to prevent the unnatural causes of wildfires.

#### **Role of Local Stakeholders**

Local governments often play a vital role in modulating the outcomes of sustainable forest and land initiatives (Kemp et al. 2005). Several example cases have shown that decreasing the influence and role of local community institutions has resulted in lower success rates in forest management (Ostrom 2009; Dressler et al. 2010). A greater level of forest degradation is usually evident in the vicinity of rural households (Kapovi´c et al. 2013) where people perceive public forests and centralized forest governance less as communal property, particularly in developing regions with weak economies. Generally, one of the shortcomings of many land- and forestrelated studies is the exclusion of the views and experiences of the landowners and land users, particularly in forest-dependent communities (Andersson et al. 2011). Natural flood management and ecosystem based approaches can manage flood risks, impacts and vulnerability (Gill et al. 2007; Munang et al. 2013), but it should be developed in close cooperation with local communities. A connected (involved) community (local, national, regional and international) is likely to make major headway in understanding the role of small retention facilities in recent floods, drought and wildfires. Involving stakeholders who are dependent on land, forests, or agriculture proves influential in their understanding of natural disasters, opportunities for prevention and mitigation, and their implication and position within those processes. Encouragement and active inclusion of private land and forest owners will increase the chances for success of any natural or technical measure, principally on private land, but also to prevent some natural disasters like wildfires. This case is also an interesting example of wide participation of different groups of stakeholders in a small retention facilities program related to public forests. However, it would be intriguing to see a community's response if small retention facilities are planned on private land or in private forests. Implementation of coherent national forest policy focused on sustainability and multi-functionality is a good test for even centralized forest management and public forests.

#### **Why Small Retention Facilities?**

A small retention program in the Polish forests comprises natural and technical measures for lowland and upland forests. The primary advantages are mainly related to the natural retention facilities, while adverse effects are related to the technical small retention facilities, especially in terms of biodiversity preservation. A recent study (Huang et al. 2018) suggests that rainfall and the forest landscape are pivotal factors triggering flood event alterations in lower return periods, which flood event dynamics in higher return periods are attributed to hydrological regulations of water infrastructures. Water balance, and thus retention of forested landscapes, is, to a large extent, controlled by forest ecosystems (Döll 2009), which include surface runoff as determined by evaporation, transpiration and water flow routing (Eisenbies et al. 2007). Small water retention facilities under forests contribute to increased evaporation and transpiration and lead to fewer flood events with a "keep the rain where it falls" approach. Hence, if evaporation and transpiration are predicted to decrease, that can increase surface runoff (Schlesinger and Jasechko 2014) and, consequently, floods. Still, small reservoirs may lose up to 50% of their stored volume due to evaporation in many regions and the high ratio of surface/volume area. Evaporation constitutes a major component of the water balance in the reservoirs and may significantly decrease flood events (Ashraf et al. 2007). In forests, the interception of precipitation and its loss by evaporation is typically 10–35% of precipitation (Wang et al. 2007). This interception loss in the forests is compatible with transpiration and evaporation less than 65–90% (Schlesinger and Jasechko 2014). Typically, forests and forest land increases evapotranspiration and tends to decrease the number of flood events (Ryu et al. 2011) and droughts.

#### **Opportunities**

Numerous public forest companies within the Europe have earned a Forest Stewardship Certificate (FSC) that confirms that the forest is managed with the intent of preserving the natural ecosystem and benefitting the lives of local people and workers all while ensuring it sustains economic viability. Forest management certification helps protect the people, plant and animal species that live in and around, and depend upon, the forest. Following a brief initial pre-assessment, the evaluation process consists of an in-depth review of forest management processes and their environmental, social, and economic impact, through defined criteria and indicators. FSC forest management certification is valid for five years and subject to annual checks whether FSC requirements are continuously met. It is a very competitive certificate and requires accomplishment in many areas of forest management, particularly whether a particular management maintains forests' biodiversity, productivity, regeneration capacity, vitality and their potential to fulfill, now and in the future, relevant ecological, economic and social functions at all levels. Small retention facilities as a positive practice should be introduced to the existing FSC criteria and indicators needed to sustain public forest management, as their implementation serve both a social and ecological function and mitigate natural disasters at the same time. Stakeholders' engagement in a participative approach can present another opportunity back to back with close cooperation between science study and practice in the application of new approaches and techniques.

#### **Final Remarks**

Small retention facilities are an exceptional example of how public forests can be managed to provide sustainability and multi-functionality and to mitigate floods, drought and wildfire at the same time. It could become an ideal model for countries with prevalence of public forests and centralized forest management. Effective stakeholder engagement, applying participatory approaches to create and implement small retention facilities is shown as successful example of adaptive public forest management. The biggest challenge to this approach is finding incentives and tradeoffs for private land and forest owners so that small retention facilities are also used on private land and private forests. Furthermore, even though small retention facilities in Polish forests are a great example of how natural disasters can be mitigated through the forest management, it is challenging to make a predictive evaluation, since outcomes will very much depend on country-specific circumstances. Furthermore, evidence of its effects is as of yet limited. The case can be understood as a direction what else can be done for mitigation of extreme events in public forests under centralized management. Extreme events affect poverty and ecosystem vulnerability through their multiplier effect. Small retention facilities could fundamentally improve people's lives and security, in addition to mitigating floods, drought and wildfires. Impacts of new forest practices clearly showed the necessity to gain more quantitative insights prior to further evaluation of the effects.

For the future, a stronger understanding of natural disasters, impacts and relationships with land use is essential to inform decision-makers regarding the importance of forests and sustainable forest management, in prevention and mitigation of floods, drought and wildfires. Small retention facilities are also a good idea for countries in a weak socio-economic situation that suffer from floods, drought and wildfires. They can benefit from the existing knowledge, available resources and results taken from other countries that have already developed and applied new approaches and techniques in forestry, agriculture, adaptation, and mitigation. Sometimes, "copying" policy and approaches from other countries and adopting existing measures, techniques, and approaches is necessary to sustain a globally feasible path.

**Acknowledgements** Open access of this chapter is funded by COST Action No. CA16209 Natural flood retention on private land, LAND4FLOOD (www.land4flood.eu), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

#### **References**

**Marijana Kapovi´c Solomun** is associate professor at Faculty of Forestry at the University of Banja Luka. Her background is forestry, forest soils, land degradation and conservation. She is a member of UNCCD SPI, and founder of the Women's Association for Nature Protection, having participated in more than 20 international and national projects in environment and land related areas. She has published more than 30 papers in international or national journals.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## Part III Small Scale NWRM in the Czech Republic

## **Chapter 6 This Is My Land! Privately Funded Natural Water Retention Measures in the Czech Republic**

**Lenka Slavíková and Pavel Raška**

**Abstract** Do landowners realize (and privately fund) natural water retention measures (NWRM) on their own land? Why? And how are they capable of assessing the hydrological and ecological effects of these measures? The Czech case study presents the story of an individual farmer who decided to invest his private resources in water retention and biodiversity enhancement while continuing his farming practices. We describe the historical and geographical background of the case study as well as the farmer's motivations and beliefs. We also discuss the scaling-up potential of the presented case. Information for the case study was gathered with a mixed-methodology approach that combined official statistical sources of cadastral records, content analyses of local media articles, a field survey and communication with the farmer during an excursion to his farm. The intention is to show the alternative when considering NWRM implementation. This alternative is heading the same direction as public subsidy schemes. Private initiatives may support (instead of undermine) public policy goals, and they are often faster and cheaper.

#### **Introduction**

Natural water retention measures (NRWM) are often initiated by river basin authorities or nature protection agencies, implemented in cooperation with multiple public bodies and supported with a public engagement processes and public funding (Rouillard et al. 2015; Hesslerová et al. 2016). Owners of the involved land represent a key stakeholder group to take into consideration. They might oppose the realization of these measures (regardless of public interest) if not properly treated.

L. Slavíková (B)

Faculty of Social and Economic Studies, Institute for Economic and Environmental Policy (IEEP), J. E. Purkynˇe University, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
P. Raška

Faculty of Science, Department of Geography, J. E. Purkynˇe University, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Hereby, planners' and decision-makers' intentions are often blocked by property right arrangements (Steinhäußer et al. 2015). Such property right arrangements may vary in different legal, tenure and planning systems, but generally they pose a contradiction between the protection of owner's interests on the one hand and the right to share and protect common environmental values on the other (Hanna et al. 1996).

For this reason, when landowners themselves take the initiative and realize (privately funded) NWRM on their own land, they should gain increasing attention.Many simple situations can arise where stakeholders may show initiative. But why they do so? Do the owners require compensations? And how are they capable of assessing hydrological and ecological effects of these measures? Numerous questions arise in the scientific community when dealing with (rather random) un-coordinated private efforts in this matter.

The Czech case study presents the story of an individual farmer who decided to "restore" his glebe. We present the extent of his activities in terms of NWRM implementation and with respect to the level of coordination with public authorities as well as his proclaimed motivations and beliefs. At the end, we discuss the scalingup potential of the presented case. In addition to these aims, the study provides an exceptional case for the post-socialist planning context, where the engagement of private actors (and their resources) in the ecosystem service provision has been a latecomer on the conservation agenda (Pavlínek and Pickles 2000; Tickle 2000).

A qualitative exploratory case study methodology was applied to obtain a complete understanding of the case (Yin 2003; Kaae et al. 2010). The research method was considered exploratory since the aim of the empirical research was to primarily investigate motives and beliefs of an individual actor pursuing public policy goals at his own expense. The goal was not to link his behaviour to an existing theory. Data for the case study was gathered from February until November 2017 through a combination of the following methods: (a) the review of publicly available records and documents (official statistical sources of cadastral records, local media articles and interviews with the farmer), (b) a field visit of the farmland, (c) un-structured personal communication with the farmer during the guided excursion on his farm. Gathered data has been manually processed and interpreted with the use of conventional content analysis to reveal existing patterns of behaviour (Hsieh and Shannon 2005).

#### **Geographical and Historical Background of the Case Study**

The area in focus is located in the northern part of the Czech Republic. The study area (Fig. 6.1) itself reaches into the western margin of the Ceské Stˇ ˇ redohoˇrí Mountains, a neovolcanic landscape dominated by the highest peak Milešovka (837 m a. s. l.; Raška and Cajz 2016). The unique scenery surrounding Milešovka has been subject to nature protection; in 1951, the first nature reserve of about 60 ha was established. In 1976, the Protected Landscape Area (PLA) Ceské Stˇ ˇ redohoˇrí of more than 106.000 ha was founded and is now protected under Czech legislation. In the broader area, there are also numerous Natura 2000 Sites defined according to the EU Habitats Directive (Ceské Stˇ ˇ redohoˇrí 2017).

The study area consists of meadows, forests and small water streams. Climatically, it is located in the rain shadow of the near Krušné Mountains north-west from the study area. The annual precipitation has been one third lower than the Czech average (CHMI 2017). Depending on topography, exposure climate (southern and northern orientations) and edaphic conditions, the variety of biotopes evolved under the long-term human cultivation. While the northern steep slopes are covered with mixed forests, they continue downslope to mesophilic meadows. The southern steep slopes, in turn, receive much more solar energy and are typical for rock-mantled slopes covered by forests as well as semixerophilic and thermophilic vegetation. The southern foothills and slightly undulating surfaces were used as orchards in the past for their suitable climatic conditions (see Fig. 6.1).

The territory has been settled and cultivated since medieval times. At the beginning of the 20th century, the land was dominantly used for pasturing and small-scale agriculture combined with fruit-growing. After 1948, during the era of Communism, small parcels were expropriated, meliorated and consolidated into the large blocks of arable land for intensive agricultural purposes. The reason was the general effort of central-planned agriculture to result with large block of fields in both lowland agricultural regions as well as upland historical rural regions (Biˇcík et al. 2001; Orsillo 2008). After the fall of Communism in 1989 and under the circumstances of transformation towards a free-market economy (cf., Hruška et al. 2015; Kupková

**Fig. 6.1** Study area–located around the Milešovka, the highest peak of the Ceské stˇ ˇ redohoˇrí Mountains in NW Czechia

and Biˇcík 2016), the existing agriculture cooperative went bankrupt, fields were abandoned due to low yields and the spontaneous succession started. At the end of the 20th century, this succession was stopped due to renaissant management practices of a new private owner who bought the abandoned land.

#### **Mr. Pitek's Land**

Mr. Daniel Pitek was born in 1966, and he is a forest engineer by education. After the fall of Communism in 1989, he established a private business based on drywall supply using hid experiences gained in Germany. He has also ran a wood-processing company. At the turn of the millennium, Mr. Pitek decided to leave the capital Prague and to settle in the Ceské Stˇ ˇ redohoˇrí Mountains in the municipality of Cernˇ ˇ cice, the area where he originally came from. According to his own words, his main motive was to come back to the countryside (Respekt 2012).

First, he bought an old tavern there and established a deer preserve nearby. He observed the problematic state of the surrounding landscape ruined by the intensive agriculture and experienced first disputes with neighbors and officers because of the deer. As a result, he decided to change the status quo; but the only way forward to him was to become a landowner and to undertake changes on his own property (Respekt 2012). He started to buy the land, one parcel after another—currently he owns about 600 ha of grasslands and 30 ha of forests in dispersed patches of different size mainly surrounding the municipality of Cernˇ ˇ cice. At the beginning, he used financial resources from his existing businesses to cross-subsidize his new activities, but his goal is to run self-sustaining farms, such as sheep breading and logging. He also receives regular agricultural subsidies on the land extended under the Single Area Payment Scheme SAPS (Idnes 2015). Nowadays, he is publicly presented as the private farmer and forester (Wikipedia 2017).

On abandoned fields, Mr. Pitek firstly cut early successional pioneer species and kept strong solitaire trees and bushes as habitats for birds and other species. This practice is not common in the case of large agricultural companies that rent the majority of the land in the surrounding: "Some neighboring farmers laughed at me, when I kept solitaire trees in meadows, because you need to drive around with the tractor. For farming such a feature is seen as an obstacle" (interview with Mr. Pirek by Neovlivni 2017). Than he changed fields into grasslands as they were better suited to the local environmental conditions of the mesophilic meadows. At the southern slopes, he re-established orchards. Over time, he also grubbed out old agricultural drainage that resulted in spontaneous water retention in lower parts of the meadows. There, with the use of the excavator, Mr. Pitek created small pools to support the retention function of the terrain (Respekt 2012). Over the past 10 years, he has established about 40 small pools (Fig. 6.2). Some of them have turned into wetlands with vegetation, others are cleared out to avoid succession (information provided during the field survey). As he put it, "Building pools is my great enjoyment. But I

**Fig. 6.2** One of the pools built instead of artificial drainage system on meadows at the northern footslopes of the Milešovka Mountain

do not found them for fun, they are fundamental for the surrounding countryside" (interview with Mr. Pitek by Idnes 2016).

For each small pool to be established, he only needs to obtain consent from the PLA authority and from the municipality. The pools are designed without regulation mechanisms and with respect to legislative size limits (area of 300 m2, depth 1.5 m) in order to avoid more complicated permitting processes related to changes in land use designation. The process of establishing a pool is well described in Mr. Pitek's answer to the question: "Could you give advice on how to set up a pool to fulfill its purpose?" (interview by Idnes 2016).

1. "First, you need to reveal where the water naturally accumulates in the countryside. It is not possible to build pools at whatever places. Sometimes, old maps may help…"—in this respect he relies on the detailed knowledge of his land, and in some cases, he also checked the old plans to verify the presence and structure of the drainage structures;

Mr. Pitek plans to build a system of 18 further large ponds (each of 2,000–3,000 m2). However, according to his words, the permit granting procedures are very different in case of large bodies of water with controlled out-flow in comparison to the process for small pools (personal communication). The pond project has been prepared for more than one year and the construction permission has not been issued yet. Mr. Pitek seems to be frustrated with this bureaucracy.

All the undertaken and planned activities are mostly privately funded. On his land, Mr. Pitek prefers to do what he considers to be the right thing without subordinance to public authorities and/or subsidy schemes. He consults experts (hydrologists, ecologists) when necessary, but most of the time he follows his "common sense": "I create something like sponge here that absorbs the rainwater and keeps it for different uses" (interview with Mr. Pitek by Idnes 2016).

So far, no permanent monitoring or evaluation of hydrological effect is available to prove any benefits of the described effort. Having appeared in the media multiple times, Mr. Pitek's activities have recently attracted the attention of scientists; accordingly, evidence may be forthcoming in the near future. However, in terms of the ecological effects and biodiversity increase, the effect of existing pools is easy to see right now, as indicated by higher yields on meadows (reported by Mr. Pitek), improvement of the grassland diversity (monitored regularly under the legal obligation by nature conservation authorities), as well as by the presence of amphibian and bird species formerly absent at the sites (reported also by researchers from the conservation agencies and local museums). The observed effects on his land also led Mr. Pitek to criticize the existing agricultural subsidies for sending perverse incentives to land management. Within these subsidies the amount of land and the agricultural production is favoured. Water retention and environmental sustainability results in the subsidy reduction. According to his opinion (information provided during the onsite visit), such perverse incentives include, for instance, subsidies for an intensive production of crops for biofuels or the former reduction of subsidized agricultural land determined based on the area of canopy of dispersed trees on meadows and pastures (thus limiting efforts for multifunctional land uses).

#### **Motivations and Interactions**

So far, we have not provided much information about the owner's motivations. According to his statements, his goal is to restore the landscape to reflect the situation at the beginning of 19th century when farmers did not exploit the land and respected the natural limits of the land use. He uses old maps (from the first third of 19th century) to support his decisions about land use changes (Idnes 2015). His ideal, therefore, represents the cultural countryside with sustainable farming rather than wilderness. He considers current intensive agricultural practices as harmful in the long run and he feels he has been doing the right thing (Neovlivni 2017).

Water management has become his key issue due to lack of water in the area—partly due to natural conditions (rain shadow), partly due to previous mismanagement (drainage systems). Climate changes that reallocate annual rainfalls have accelerated the problem. Mr. Pitek described the countryside he saw when returning from Prague as follows: "On hillsides, there were dying trees surrounded with totally torrid landscape that slowly turned into dessert" (interview with Mr. Pitek by Neovlivni 2017). Therefore, his intention has been to reverse this situation by changed management and agricultural practices and pool restoration. Judging by his numerous statements published in mass-media interviews, Mr. Pitek is fully aware of the interconnection of farming practices and small-water cycle, and his goal is to minimize adverse effects. The increasing problem of drought (as detected by official Czech documents—see Strategy 2017) is also fully reflected: "Everyone speaks about up-coming drought, but it is already here!" (interview with Mr. Pitek by Neovlivni 2017).

Therefore, the initial motivation of pool and future pond restoration is not to contribute to flood risk mitigation, but to accumulate more rainwater in the upstream area for groundwater storage, farming and as a positive side effect for the biodiversity enhancement. Mr. Pitek is satisfied with the possibility to restore pools on his own—cheaply and fast. He is not fond of existing subsidy schemes as they frequently require increased bureaucracy (Idnes 2015).

The private effort is in line with the current management plan of the PLA Ceské ˇ Stˇredohoˇrí within which Mr. Pitek's land is situated. The plan confirms a lack of water surfaces in the area, and the goal should be to establish small pools and wetlands to increase the retention capacity of the landscape (Management Plan 2017). The Czech Nature Conservation Agency and the Czech State Forest Company have reestablished several pools and lakes with the use of public resources. The greatest obstacle remains the availability of land.

Therefore, the private owner and the public agencies undertake similar measures in different localities and pursue the same goals. Their mutual interactions, however, are not following official procedures. They are rather informal, based on social relationships. Mr. Pitek also serves as a PLA ranger and founded the local environmental NGO to interfere with development and restoration plans in the area. So far, the PLA has not funded any of Mr. Pitek pools from public financial resources, and there are no such plans for the future.

As apparent from abundant publicly accessible information in the press, Mr. Pitek's activities attract public attention. In 2015, he was awarded the Czech environmental price of Josef Vavroušek (Nadace partnerství 2017). He regularly speaks with media and organizes excursions for students and other persons concerned. He was the unsuccessful regional political candidate for the Green Party in 2016, but later he left the party for disagreement with its future orientation. As a result of public exposure, natural scientists intend to establish bio-monitoring at his pools to analyze ecosystem dynamics. Mr. Pitek has already built strong ties with regional institutions and scientists, such as ornitologists and botanists, who are starting to perform both the formal and informal monitoring and research activities on his land. The example of formal research is represented with periodical inventory and assessment of grasslands in the PLA Ceské stˇ ˇ redohoˇrí (see above), whereas informal research is mainly based on monitoring endangered species of birds, for instance. Generally, he welcomes all kinds of scientific and dissemination activities, although he does not wait for the results to proceed further.

#### **Scaling-Up Potential?**

Numerous small scale efforts of the non-public nature field protection can be detected throughout Europe and world-wide—such as land trust movements (Ruseva et al. 2016; Bastian et al. 2017), Audubon society (Merchant 2010), etc. Different nongovernmental non-profit organizations (NGOs) play an important role in this process as they gain private or public resources for buying the land and change its management (including the wetland protection or re-establishment, renaturalization of small water streams, etc.). When describing their activities, authors are often concerned with transparency (Adams and Moon 2013) and sustainability of their practices, especially when day-to-day management of gained land incurs additional costs (Pasquini et al. 2011).

Initiatives by individual private owners using their own resources for water retention or biodiversity enhancement, for example, are randomly described. Reasons might be that their activities are not considered special or/and they often do not seek for the public or academic attention. This situation is in sharp contrast with the enormous effort invested in the promotion of participatory governance schemes, where getting people "on board" is the main challenge. More cases of philanthropic (or not so profit-oriented) landowners would show us that, under some circumstances, private interest may be used to increase water retention, biodiversity, etc. Furthermore, if you own the land, whatever you do is fast and cheap (although non-participatory and to some extent non-expert).

In the Czech Republic, as a post-socialist country, environmentally concerned philanthropism came back to life after 1989, and is still in its infancy. Although a growing land trust movement is detectable (CSOP 2018) and a few other privatebased efforts in biodiversity conservation exist (Ceska pozice 2012), the Pitek case is exceptional in terms of its extent and the hydro-ecological focus.<sup>1</sup> His aim to reconcile farming with water retention and biodiversity enhancement is in sharp contrast with agricultural practices prevailing throughout the Czech Republic, where the large share of agricultural land is rented to large companies and tends to degrade (see Skleniˇcka 2016 for further evidence).

According to our opinion, individual cases, such as the one presented in our chapter, provide two challenges. First, they facilitate understanding of the possible individual motivations of land-owners, the mechanisms of their actions and constraints they face in environmental management. Understanding these issues seems to be crucial for targeted (tailored) and effective communication of NWRM implementation under different land ownerships. To reveal these individual motivations, institutional mechanisms and constraints, we propose an analytic framework that addresses the permissive and productive conditions to perform the NRWM measures in various contexts (see Fig. 6.3).

Second, and related to the previous, unlike the organized efforts of various NGOs that are aimed at single issues (mostly but not solely biodiversity) and that frequently don't consider economic valuations as the primary criterion for environmental management, the presented case shows that individual landowners may consider environmental measures in a more complex way (water retention as well as biodiversity) and in a framework of economic sustainability since they take financial responsibility for any effects and side-effects of their action.

It is not our intention to declare that more landowners like Mr. Pitek would solve our problems with NWRM enforcement and financing. As he put it: "Of course, everything I did was possible due to incomes from my drywall supply and wood processing business. Also my entire family supports me. Otherwise I would not be able to manage it" (quote from Respekt 2012)—this shows that private initiatives may support (not only undermine) public policy goals (compare different theoretical approaches in Slavíková et al. 2010). The rationale to promote and even establish private initiatives is mostly rooted in their potential to overcome land-use conflicts and improve conservation efforts on fragmented land through coordinated action. Another rationale lies in private landowner's ability to overtake the responsibility to sustain the NWRM or other environmental measures. To allow for upscaling, such direction will, however, make it necessary (i) to explore the various territorial and legal contexts (areas under conservation, tenure schemes etc.) for privately-funded NWRM, and (ii) to reconsider the current agricultural subsidy schemes in order to stress their complex dedication, thus debunking the misconception that they shall support the sole productive functions of agricultural land.

<sup>1</sup>Researchers have identified a few other efforts in the Czech Republic, but these (i) are still in their beginnings with no published data, and (ii) represent the participatory rather than the bottom-up approach initiated by land-owners. These examples, for instance, include the current (re-)establishment of pools, ponds and greenery in the extensive agricultural land near the city of Liberec (Northern Czech Republic). In this case, the regional authorities looked for land threatened by droughts and have found a land-owner with ca. 1000 ha land, who—upon negotiations—was keen to realize the plans using both subsidies and his own financial sources.

**Fig. 6.3** Tentative framework to assess the feedback between motivation for and effects of the environmental action based on the case study

**Acknowledgements** We thank the Operational Programme Research, Development and Education of the Czech Republic for financing the project Smart City—Smart Region—Smart Community (grant number: CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/17\_048/0007435) that led to the present book chapter.

Open access of this chapter is funded by COST Action No. CA16209 Natural flood retention on private land, LAND4FLOOD (www.land4flood.eu), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

#### **References**

Wikipedia (2017) Daniel Pitek. https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel\_Pitek. Accessed 15 Nov 2017 Yin RK (2003) Case study research: design and methods, 3rd edn. Sage Publication, London

**Lenka Slavíková** graduated from the University of Economics, Prague (public economics and policy). Currently, she serves as Associate Professor at the Faculty of Social and Economic Studies at JEP University in Ustí nad Labem. Her long-term interest lies in water and biodiversity governance with the focus on Central and Eastern European Countries. She investigates flood risk perception of different actors and financial instruments for flood recovery and mitigation.

**Pavel Raška** (\*1982) graduated from JEP University (history and geography) and Masaryk University (physical geography). He is currently Associate Professor and Head at the Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, JEP University in Ústí nad Labem. His main research interests include flood hazards and risk reduction, in which he explores interdisciplinary perspectives on institutional barriers to FRM and planning.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

**Chapter 7 Commentary: Mr. Pitek's Land from a Perspective of Managing Hydrological Extremes: Challenges in Upscaling and Transferring Knowledge**

**Mark E. Wilkinson**

**Abstract** This chapter views the case of Mr. Pitek by looking at the role of NBS in managing hydrological extremes. By viewing the case from a hydrological sciences perspective, we can begin to investigate whether these measures would have an impact in mitigating these extremes (e.g., reducing and delaying a flood peak). Therefore, this chapter gives some suggestions on what information we might need to make this assessment and the challenges and uncertainties in upscaling this approach. Also, the chapter explores if this type of privately funded land management approach is likely to be utilised by other land managers to give a greater density of measures at larger scales.

#### **The Use of Nature-Based Solutions to Manage Hydrological Extremes**

Evidence suggests that a warming climate is affecting the timing of river floods in Europe, and projections suggest that climate change will also affect the frequency of floods (IPCC 2012; Bloschl et al. 2017). Similarly, drought risk is also projected to increase over the next decade across most of Europe (Spinoni et al. 2018). Different catchment management approaches can play a role in mitigating these hydrological extremes, for example, using Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), alongside and complementing traditionally engineered approaches. Our catchments also need to provide

M. E. Wilkinson (B)

James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2019

T. Hartmann et al. (eds.), *Nature-Based Flood Risk Management on Private Land*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23842-1\_7

other services, such as food production. Intensive agriculture is known to play a role in increasing runoff rates, potentially resulting in flooding and wider water management issues (O'Connell et al. 2007) (this is a common point raised by Mr. Pitek). Many European catchments share an intense focus on farming, a range of environmental issues such as pollution and degraded habitat, highly regulated governance regimes and vulnerability to climate and demographic changes. Hence, agricultural management can become a strategy for managing hydrological extremes but only if the right co-ordination, guidance and compensatory mechanisms are in place. Usually funding is required from public sources to implement catchment-wide NBS over larger scales (e.g., see www.nwrm.eu).

This chapter views the case of Mr. Pitek by looking at the role of NBS in managing hydrological extremes. By viewing the case from a hydrological sciences perspective, we can begin to investigate whether these measures would have an impact in mitigating these extremes (e.g., reducing and delaying a flood peak). Therefore, this chapter gives some suggestions on what information we might need to make this assessment and the challenges and uncertainties in upscaling this approach. Also, the chapter explores if this type of privately funded land management approach is likely to be utilised by other land managers to give a greater density of measures at larger scales.

It is unusual that, as in Mr. Pitek's privately funded approach, a landowner is motivated to invest their own resources to implement NBS measures that additionally lead to a reduction in their farmland's productivity. It is unlikely that many other landowners can spare resources aside from immediate farm business needs; they must instead be motivated by agri-environment subsidies (e.g., funded by the EU Common Agricultural Policy [CAP]). Holstead et al. (2017) found that, in a survey of Scottish farmers, 53% had not installed measures as they considered their land too valuable in its current form, and 38% stated that they did not have measures because of insufficient funding. Other than economics, some other well-established barriers hinder measures at the farm level, as summarised by Holstead et al. (2017):

However, these barriers to uptake are not just limited to farmers, and further barriers can be seen in wider institutional bodies (see Waylen et al. 2018).

Nevertheless, the use of pools and wetlands, as presented in this case, is a common option where catchment management schemes have been implemented with a primary aim for FRM (see European Commission 2016). Wetlands and ponds can provide many ecosystem services (Nagabhatla and Metcalfe 2018), whilst temporary storage ponds are starting to become more popular in areas such as North-West Europe as a means of storing water on agricultural land without impacting productivity too much (Environment Agency 2017) and mitigating the impact of soil erosion by collecting sediments (Evrard et al. 2008). Wetlands have been said to help to alleviate flood risk within catchments (Environment Agency 2017); floodplain wetlands have greater potential for managing floods (Acreman and Holden 2013).

#### **Spatial Complexities and Challenges in Upscaling**

Mr. Pitek has been creating pools and wetlands on his land to improve low flows whilst delivering other ecosystem services (e.g., biodiversity enhancement, FRM). If the primary function were to increase groundwater recharge, then the first discussion point would be the optimal placement of these measures in terms of how they connect with the subsurface hydrology. Wetlands may be present in the natural landscape because of impermeable underlying soils or rocks, thus little interaction with the groundwater system occurs. A literature review by Bullock and Acreman (2003) found that, out of 69 literature statements referring to wetland groundwater recharge, 32 assumed without detailed investigation that recharge occurred and 18 suggested no recharge. Finally, six studies found wetlands recharge more, and nine found wetland recharge less than other land types. Therefore, this critical hydrological connectivity of a wetland intending to recharge groundwater systems is suggested by literature to be uncertain, complex and varying from site to site. Wider knowledge is required to understand this spatial complexity, for example, information on geology, soil type and land use.

When considering the role of such pools and wetlands in FRM, the available storage prior to and during a flood event is a key aspect. If a pond is full prior to an event, then it has little available storage to help mitigate the flood runoff (see Quinn et al. 2013). Therefore, one example would be to add a soil bund around the measure to create new "freeboard" storage (i.e., temporary storage). This would allow the pond to store more water during a flood event that could be designed to slowly drain away after the event (e.g., through an outfall or infiltration). This temporary storage approach can be implemented on floodplains and hillslope fields through the creation of bunds (see Environment Agency 2017). This was a common approach applied in the Belford catchment (6 km2), UK (Wilkinson et al. 2010; European Commission 2016). However, a larger volume of extra storage would be required at larger catchment scales. Metcalfe et al. (2017) suggested that, in a 29 km<sup>2</sup> UK catchment, 168,000 m3 of extra storage would be required to attenuate peak flow to prevent flooding in a 1.5% Exceedance Probability flood. Mr. Pitek notes that the planning procedure for implementing larger ponds (e.g., 2,000–3,000 m2) requires greater consent. This suggests that there is a need to review planning procedures to implement larger volume areas (1,000–10,000 m3) of storage using more natural engineering without falling into the categories of traditionally engineered reservoirs (e.g., >10,000 m3), where detailed reservoir planning requirements need to be considered, increasing project costs and timescales (see Wilkinson et al. 2013).

As scale increases, the evidence of NBS effectiveness decreases owing to limited empirical studies at larger scales. However, it is at these large scales where policy and planning are more interested in overall combined system performance. In this case, the current plan of the PLA Ceské Stˇ ˇ redohoˇrí suggests further pools and wetlands are needed to increase the retention capacity of the landscape. Therefore, effective planning and coordination are required to ensure the measures are correctly placed and to minimise any disadvantages at larger planning scales. For example, for FRM, this can involve ensuring measures don't add to the synchronicity of flood peak levels in adjacent tributaries joining a main downstream river but instead try to decouple them (see Lane 2017).

#### **Reflecting on Comparable International Cases**

Compared to ponds and wetlands supported by agri-environment and other public funding (e.g., via EU CAP or LIFE funding), those privately funded are likely to be far fewer. However, for different measure types the number of privately funded measures may be greater. For example, a survey in England during the 2013/14 crop year found that 44% of surveyed holdings (and totalling 450,000 ha) had some sort of land in management actions taken from a list of 22 environmental measures that were undertaken without any funding (this includes measures such as grass buffer strips next to a watercourse, fertiliser free permanent pasture, over-wintered stubbles etc.) (DEFRA 2014). Therefore, if the measures generally do not interfere (or show positive coherence) with farming practices, then unpaid measures could be supported by farmers. DEFRA (2014) highlighted that 79% of surveyed farmers responded that protecting soil and water is a primary factor in their land management. However, other studies have noted this motivation alters with different measures, especially those which change land use permanently or impact farm productivity, such as the blocked drains and ponded areas in the Pitek case. Spray et al. (2015) emphasized concerns of farmers in Southern Scotland over potential loss of capital and annual values due to loss of workable land now and in the future. The research suggested that measures involving a reduction in yield or useable land area are not favoured unless a payment mechanism is in place (preferably of annual income, as opposed to one-off compensation).

The notion of privately funded NBS depends on having land available to implement the measures. Therefore, Mr. Pitek is limited not only in regard to his financial resources but also as to when land is available to buy. The approach is not widespread in the case study area, as Mr. Pitek has been unable to motivate his local neighbours. The case stresses a landscape mosaic with many different landowners with measures generally dispersed only on Mr. Pitek's land. How land is owned and managed varies from country to country. In Scotland around 50% of Scotland belongs to 432 owners, including private and conservation charities/trusts (McGuire 2017). These trusts are generally focused on multifunctional landscapes and consider many aspects of land management as opposed to the Pitek case. He noted that conservation trusts are usually focused on one agenda. So, for the case of Scotland, if one of these other large-scale private landowners were to consider investing their own resources into the natural landscape, then the scale of restoration could increase significantly. This is the case with one such landowner who owns over 80,000 ha of Scotland (one of the largest private landowners in Scotland). This owner is creating high-end, naturebased experiences and is interested in the social as well as the ecological needs of the Highlands of Scotland. However, how he and conservation trusts manage the landscape (like Mr. Pitek) may not be "traditional" to some local communities in terms of their management for landscapes to support local livelihoods (going back to the point of traditions mentioned by Holstead et al. 2017).

Globally, in some cases, local communities see water holding measures as an integral part of past traditions and have been reviving historical knowledge and traditions about water management. For example, Rajasthan, India has suffered from extensive drought periods. In the 1980s many of the region's rivers were dry and degraded, where many of the traditional water holding measures were not functioning. Since then over 10,000 Johads (a temporary storage area within a river system designed to hold and infiltrate water) have been constructed by local people to increase recharge into the local aquifer and the river systems are now flowing more regularly. Before the construction of the measures, only ~5% of runoff made it into the aquifer; this has now increased to ~20% (Sisodia 2009). This community-driven initiative has been paramount to the coordination and success of the project (Sisodia 2009).

More empirical evidence is necessary on the effectiveness of catchment approaches for managing hydrological extremes at the catchment scale (Schanze 2017). Therefore, further long-term monitoring of case studies is needed. However, a challenge remains in attaining robust evidence of managed catchments compared to a local control catchment where no management has taken place but where background (e.g., climate) factors can be assessed, and additionally comparing both before and after interventions (see Chap. 6 in Environment Agency 2017). In Mr. Pitek's case, to begin hydrological monitoring after the interventions have been installed may cause challenges in interpreting the evidence.

#### **Concluding Remarks**

Currently, the use of catchment-wide NBS in most parts of Northern Europe are focused on flood rather than drought management. However, some catchment planners are now starting to give more consideration to low flow management (e.g., Holt 2018, describes how Slovakia is currently looking at national plans to drought management through NBS). Therefore, the Pitek case offers useful insights into the process of constructing pools and wetlands on the ground (using private funds) to manage low flows and provide wider benefits. If the case were monitored alongside a suitable control area, this could present a useful empirical evidence case study. However, to upscale, researchers would need to gain an understanding how many water holding measures might be needed to influence low flows. The case also highlights the need for central coordination, support and planning for implementing measures over larger scales. The use of decision support tools and opportunity maps could allow for complex information to be used more easily and readily by landowners, implementors and planners (Mackay et al. 2015). For privately funded cases, accessible support mechanisms are needed to allow landowners to access advice on matters such as (a) working in the optimal places, (b) ensuring the measure is designed correctly to deliver its desired ecosystem service, (c) suggesting how measures could be adapted to deliver wider ecosystem services. Mr. Pitek's case also suggests a need to improve the legislative and administration process (e.g., the licencing paperwork) so that it is not seen as a burden that puts people off from implementing measures. In summary, it is vital that these initiatives are supported by offering accessible guidance and acknowledgement given to those who wish to use their private finances in helping to improve the environmental and ecological qualities of our landscapes. For that, it is only fitting that Mr. Pitek has been acknowledged with prestigious awards.

**Acknowledgements** Open access of this chapter is funded by COST Action No. CA16209 Natural flood retention on private land, LAND4FLOOD (www.land4flood.eu), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

#### **References**

Acreman M, Holden J (2013) How wetlands affect floods. Wetlands 33:773–786

**Mark Wilkinson** is a senior research scientist in catchment hydrology at the James Hutton Institute. The focus of his work is designing and investigating the impact of NBS with the main aim to reduce and attenuate flood peaks. He is also interested in the multiple benefits associated with these measures.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Chapter 8 Commentary: A Spatial Planning Perspective on Privately Funded Natural Water Retention Measures**

**Lukas Löschner**

This contribution puts privately funded natural water retention measures (NWRM) in a spatial planning perspective. It comments on the case presented by Slavíková and Raška (this volume), which investigates the role of a forest engineer and farmer (Mr. Pitek) who acquired and restored degraded agricultural areas by improving the water retention capacities and developing more sustainable farming practices. The case is exceptional because it illustrates that private initiatives may actually support, and not only undermine, public policy goals concerning the enhancement of biodiversity and landscape ecology. It thus stands in contrast to related studies, which typically explore the efforts of public authorities and their respective policy instruments to implement NWRM. Such studies often identify private landowners as a key target group of policy interventions (due to their private rights to property and land use), but focus on the policy means by which to incentivise NWRM or mobilise land to facilitate their realisation. Instead of placing private landowners at the receiving end of environmental policies, this study provides a bottom-up landowner perspective. It investigates the personal motivations for restoring the ecological quality of landscapes and provides valuable insights into the (mal)functioning of specific policy instruments (e.g., agricultural subsidies) and the bureaucratic procedures involved in landscape restoration.

Although Mr. Pitek's initiative to restore water retention ponds is principally in line with the overall aims of environmental policy in the region, he makes a point "to do what he considers to be the right thing without subordinance to public authorities and/or subsidy schemes" (Slavíková and Raška, this volume). He has purposely chosen to build a series of small retention pools "to avoid complicated permitting processes related to changes in land use designation". In fact, Mr. Pitek's plans to install larger ponds remain to be realized due to lengthy authorization processes and

L. Löschner (B)

Department of Landscape, Spatial and Infrastructure Sciences, Institute of Spatial Planning, Environmental Planning and Land Rearrangement (IRUB), University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences Vienna (BOKU), Vienna, Austria e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2019

T. Hartmann et al. (eds.), *Nature-Based Flood Risk Management on Private Land*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23842-1\_8

he "seems to be frustrated with this bureaucracy". He is moreover highly sceptical of agricultural subsidies, which he criticizes for "sending perverse incentives to land management and agricultural production"; "instead of supporting measures, such as those aimed at water retention and biodiversity (…) subsidies [are provided] to intensive production of crops for biofuels".

Mr. Pitek's satisfaction "with the possibility to restore pools on his own—cheaply and fast" illustrates that the prevailing set of regulatory and financial instruments in Czech environmental policy is apparently not suited to foster NWRM on privately owned land. While the effectiveness of agricultural subsidies and regulations is a critical issue in this regard, the aim of this contribution is to place the above case in a spatial planning perspective. In this vein, it provides a reflection on the opportunities and limitations of spatial and land policy instruments to implement NWRM and discusses the contribution of this study for related research in environmental policy.

#### **Securing Land Resources for NWRM with Spatial Planning Instruments**

Generally speaking, spatial planning refers to "the geographical expression, implementation, and coordination of public policy across sectors and scales. (…) By creating spatial plans [it] expresses where and in what form policy will unfold, coordinates and aligns initiatives to avoid duplication of effort or divergent policies being adopted" (Castree et al. 2013, p. 485). Regulatory instruments of spatial planning—for example, regional spatial plans, local zoning plans or building schemes—can thus play an important role to legally secure the necessary land resources for NWRM. Regional spatial plans, for instance, may be used to designate large-scale areas for flood retention or flood runoff (see Löschner et al., this volume). Similarly, regional spatial plans may be used to preserve wetlands and natural floodplain, not only as a means to attenuate runoff attenuation and propagate flood waves, but mainly to preserve and enhance the biodiversity of riverine ecosystems. Local zoning plans are also effective formal planning instruments to allocate land for green and blue infrastructure, while building schemes may, for instance, be used to define smallscale rainwater detention basins on the plot-level and thus contribute towards better municipal rainwater management in the face of climate-induced increases in pluvial floods.

These (formal) spatial planning instruments are, however, overwhelmingly limited to settlement areas and building land. In general, spatial planning has little leverage on agricultural or forestry land. Apart from assessing the compatibility of land use plans, spatial planning does not dispose of the necessary regulatory means to infringe on agricultural land and is therefore not able to play a significant role in facilitating NWRM in these areas.

#### **Mobilising Land Resources for NWRM Through Land Consolidation**

Given these limitations, it may be useful to also consider instruments of land policy (as a closely related discipline) and take a look in particular at the instrument of land consolidation and its possibilities to realize public aims on privately-owned agricultural and forest land. Land consolidation is an instrument of land management to enlarge, redesign, rearrange and improve agricultural and forest land. As indicated, for instance, in the Austrian federal Framework Land Consolidation Act, the objective of land consolidation is to improve and rearrange the conditions of agricultural cultivation on behalf of an efficient and environmentally friendly agriculture by consolidation and development of agricultural and forest land (Mansberger and Seher 2017). Land consolidation schemes generally demand a bottom-up initiative and a common interest on the side of the landowner(s) to rearrange parcels of agricultural land for a certain benefit. A land consolidation scheme may thus be started if disadvantages in farming structure (land fragmentation of unfavourable plot size) shall be eliminated.

Although the core task of land consolidation is the improvement of farming structures, in Austria the instrument is also applied to obtain the necessary land resources for the public benefit, such as the development of traffic infrastructure. In this vein, multifunctional land consolidation schemes are also increasingly implemented to address non-agricultural, land-related issues, such as acquiring land for flood retention and flood protection measures, as well as for river restoration and nature conservation. Land acquisition for flood plains, considering both public interests and landowners' expectations can be realised by means of land consolidation. The substantial strength of this procedure lies within the mobility of land, as parcels may be purchased anywhere within the consolidation area and allocated where needed. This allows, for instance, for the creation of coherent areas for flood runoff and flood retention, which would normally not be possible through land acquisition, given the oftentimes large number of riparian landowners. Nevertheless, multifunctional land consolidation is strongly dependent on the availability of land required by planning authorities. In the future, restrictions for this type of land consolidation can be expected due to increasing agricultural land use demands as a result of higher prices for agricultural products and the production of renewables (Seher 2015).

#### **Further Questions and Lessons Learned**

The above spatial planning and land policy instruments are of course only applicable if a need to provide (private) land for a specific environmental policy goal exists, such as natural water or flood retention. In the case of Mr. Pitek, however, agricultural practices actually align with and in many ways support public aims to increase biodiversity and water retention capacities in degraded agricultural areas. The principal question concerning this case therefore is not how we may secure or mobilise the necessary land resources to better fulfil a public policy aim, but rather how comparable initiatives by private landowners may be promoted.

In this regard, Slavíková and Raška rightly stress that the current agricultural subsidy scheme is too fixated on agricultural production and is therefore in need of reconsideration to also provide incentives for multifunctional land uses and more locally attuned cultivation methods. They, however, also highlight the central role of land ownership—in particular given Czechia's rather recent transition to a market economy—to effectively implement NWRM: to Mr. Pitek, "the only way forward (…) was to become a landowner and to undertake changes on his own property". Owning the land allows him to get things done "fast and cheap (although nonparticipatory and to some extent non-expert)". This puts planning authorities into a bit of a dilemma because it shows the difficulties of involving such hidden champions in a more coordinated environmental policy scheme. Although Mr. Pitek's agricultural approach has drawn increasing scholarly attention and shows apparent benefits in terms of an observed increase in biodiversity as well as agricultural yield, "no permanent monitoring" to assess the actual hydrological effects and ancillary benefits of his actions has been put into place.

With the aim of bringing private initiatives and public authorities together, a big challenge therefore appears to be to build a better understanding of the different rationales but maybe also how to build mutual trust. Slavíková and Raška mention that efforts have been made to promote "participatory governance schemes" in this field. Especially in a former Communist country with a weak tradition in participatory planning approaches, it would be interesting to learn more about these governance schemes and processes: What are their specific aims? How are they organised? Who is involved and why is it so challenging to get people "on board"? Which role could people like Mr. Pitek play in such processes? Delving deeper into these issue could provide further insights into how private initiatives and public aims in environmental policy can be more clearly aligned.

Overall, the account of Mr. Pitek, however, is highly valuable because it gives a rare stakeholder-centred perspective on environmental policy. It shows that research can benefit from zooming in on a landowner perspective to obtain complementary insights to the often policy-centred research. Apart from learning about the farmers' intrinsic motivations, the case also provides interesting insights into different policy instruments. It thus highlights that—when investigating policy instruments (be they in spatial planning, land policy or agriculture)—it is critical to not just look at "how intentions of policy are translated into operational activities" (de Bruijn and Hufen 1998, p. 12) but to also account for those targeted by the policy instruments. Such a perspective may help understand in how far subsidies, regulations or other policy instruments are able to achieve their desired effect (e.g., by delivering changes in land use and fostering NWRM). At the same time it is crucial to keep in mind that policy instruments are generally not simply functional in design, but instrument choice actually depends on a number of different factors, including the institutional context, interest groups etc. (Linder and Peters 1989). Bringing the different perspectives—stakeholder-policy and substantive-process—in the research on policy instruments together can contribute to developing a more encompassing understanding of environmental policies.

**Acknowledgements** Open access of this chapter is funded by COST Action No. CA16209 Natural flood retention on private land, LAND4FLOOD (www.land4flood.eu), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

#### **References**

**Dr. Lukas Löschner** has an academic background in Political Science and Landscape Planning and holds a Ph.D. in Spatial Planning. His main field of research is natural hazard risk management, which he explores in a combination of political science and planning approaches. He currently conducts research on the following topics: spatial adaptation to flooding, policy coordination in FRM, flood risk governance, and flood storage compensation.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## Part IV Floodplain Development in Flanders

## **Chapter 9 Swapping Development Rights in Swampy Land: Strategic Instruments to Prevent Floodplain Development in Flanders**

#### **Ann Crabbé and Tom Coppens**

Creating natural flooding areas to give way to water requires space. In practice, it is often difficult to deal with historically designated development rights, particularly in densely populated areas. Development rights are often seen as a part of land property rights of a land title and represent a certain financial value. Our contribution aims to describe how Flanders, the northern and Dutch speaking region of Belgium, struggles with (re)allocating development rights in flood-prone areas, highlighting that regular and innovative policy instruments significantly shape the behavioural responses of different actors in flood plains. In our article, we discern instruments for reallocation based on market approaches, government approaches and community approaches. From the Flemish context, we learn that (re)allocating development rights through government-based initiatives with financial compensations is still considered the most feasible approach, although the costs for the government may escalate. Even though Flanders is working with innovative instruments like trading development rights and exchange of development rights, they are expected not to fulfil the promise of becoming a true alternative for the central government-led initiatives. The main reason for that is that incentives to trade development rights or pool land are lacking as there is no real advantage for landowners nor municipal governments in participating in trade or pooling.

A. Crabbé (B)

T. Coppens Faculty of Design Sciences, Research Group for Urban Development, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Faculty of Social Sciences, Centre of Research on Environmental and Social Change (CRESC), University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
#### **Introduction**

Climate change and increasing land coverage have an impact on flooding risks, even in areas that historically didn't have problems with water (Hellmann and de Moel 2014; Wheater and Evans 2009). In the evolution from technocratic "vertical" flooding policies to a socio-ecologic "horizontal" approach, most governments aim to restrict urbanisation of risk areas, in order to make "space for rivers" (Warner et al. 2012). The "space for rivers" thereby reflects a paradigm shift from a technological approach oriented toward containing and restraining water flows with the help of dikes and artificial basins versus a nature-based approach with loosely controlled natural flooding areas.

Creating natural flooding areas to give way to water requires space. In practice, it is often difficult to deal with historically designated development rights in these areas, in particular in densely populated areas. Development rights are often seen as a part of land property rights of a land title and represent a certain financial value (Nelson et al. 2013). Changing the development rights therefore results in a financial loss for the property owners. Property owners in flooding areas tend to oppose government initiatives to restrict new developments that often lead to a gap between water policies' goals and their effective implementation.

The most common instrument to (re)allocate development rights is through zoning or rezoning. However, this instrument is often not considered attractive, due to long procedures and expensive financial compensations. Next to zoning, alternative (innovative) instruments are being developed: (a) the system of tradable land development rights, which is a market-based instrument and (b) the system of exchange of development rights and land pooling (see box in Fig. 9.1).

Our contribution aims to describe how Flanders, the northern and Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, struggles with (re)allocating development rights in flood-prone areas, highlighting that regular and innovative policy instruments significantly shape the behavioural responses of different actors in flood plains. In the next section, we briefly describe flood risks in Flanders and some core characteristics of land use policy in Flanders. We introduce the idea of designating "signal areas" as a means to give policy priority to these areas where the planned land use conflicts with the potentially high flood risk damage. We discuss that changing development rights via (government-initiated) spatial implementation plans does not seem to be a very effective and time-efficient solution. This explains why the Flemish government decided to develop complementary and alternative instruments: trading development rights and mandatory land readjustment. We state that these innovative approaches are not (yet) a true alternative for a central government-led approach as the necessary incentives to trade development rights or pool land are structurally lacking.

#### **Box 1: Three types of solutions for land management**

Governance problems such as water and land use management can typically be approached by three types of coordination mechanisms: markets, hierarchies and networks (Thompson, 1991) . In the table below, we discern three types of solutions for the governance land management: a government-based, a market-based and a community-based solution. (a) The government-based solution is the most common, with a hierarchical government that intervenes with the idea that its intervention can influence or stimulate welfare for all. Classical land management instruments in a government-based approach are zoning, expropriation and (right of) pre-emption. (b) Market-based solutions and community-based solutions are much less practiced. In the market-based solution, land is considered an economic good with demand for and supply of land from societal/economic actors, that transact property rights. The government only intervenes in a facilitating role, not in an authoritative function. Transferable development rights are a typical land management instrument in a market-based approach (Nelson et al., 2013; Ward, 2013). (b) In a community-based approach land is considered part of the commons, for which collective action is needed. In that approach, citizens need negotiation and mutual coordination to settle land issues and develop institutions that govern common affairs (Ostrom, 1990). A typical land management instrument that fits a community-based approach is (voluntary or mandatory) land adjustment (van der Krabben & Needham, 2008)

**Fig. 9.1** Three types of solutions for land management

#### **Flood Risks and Land Use Policy in Flanders**

#### *The Risk of Floods in Flanders*

Flood risk control poses an important challenge in Flanders, the low-lying part of Belgium. Geographically, it consists in a coastal basin plain in the north-west and a central plain, crossed by the river basin of the river Scheldt, the Yzer and the Meuse and their tributaries. With an average density of about 485 inhabitants per km2, the region has a high level of urbanization. Moreover, as the historical urbanisation mainly took place along the rivers, the river valleys tend to be the most populated areas, making them especially vulnerable to flood risks.

According to the OFDA/CRED international disaster database, the frequency of problematic floods has been increasing over the last years in Belgium (see www. emdat.be). River flooding occurs due to a combination of heavy rainfall and long periods of rain. Also sea storms can pose risks for cities along the estuaries of the Scheldt and Yzer. According to the Flanders climate report, 7.5% of the total surface is now exposed to an increased risk of flooding, affecting 220 000 inhabitants. The same report estimates the average yearly costs of flooding damage at about EUR 50 million.

Current models predict an increase of flooding in the future. Although the exact impact of climate change on flood risk is still unclear (Brouwers et al. 2009), it is expected that changing land use patterns and soil sealing will result in an increase in peak loads of the river system. The total of sealed soil increased from 4 to 5% in 1976 to 12.9% in 2012, whereas the total share of urbanized land now approaches one third of the total surface (Departement Omgeving 2017). According to the Flemish administration, about 6 ha per day are converted to urban use. The high levels of urban sprawl in Flanders further present a particular challenge to flood control (De Decker 2011; Verbeek et al. 2014), with ribbon development and scattered, lowdensity development.

#### *Land Use Policy in Flanders*

In the federal state of Belgium, the competencies on spatial planning and environment are situated at the regional level. The current planning framework in Flanders is determined by the 1962 Belgian act on spatial planning, the 1997 structure plan, the 1999 decree and the 2009 Codex on spatial planning.

The Belgian 1962 act introduced a comprehensive set of hierarchical zoning plans on different scale levels. The plans on the regional level or the *gewestplannen*, which were developed and approved in the 1970s and the early 1980s, have been seminal for the Belgian planning system. They provided detailed zoning prescriptions for the whole territory that are still in place today (for an example, see Fig. 9.2). Because of an overestimation of the growth during the making of the *gewestplannen*, but also

**Fig. 9.2** The "gewestplan": land covering comprehensive zoning instrument. *Source* Extract of the regional zoning plan for Antwerp and surrounding municipalities; made in QGIS, based on the regional dataset of the 'gewestplan'

political lobbying from local governments resulting in an excess of supply in housing areas, many areas designated for development are still left unbuilt. The Flemish government estimates that about 41 000 ha of designated land in the *gewestplannen* are still available for housing and mixed use developments, providing a large "juridical stock" of buildable land. A sizable share of this stock is located in water-prone areas.

The majority of this land belongs to private landowners who have development rights that are not restricted in time. Although one needs a building permit to build, in practice building permits in designated housing areas cannot just be refused without compensation. Moreover, the zoning of the *gewestplannen* has had a dramatic impact on land prices that fuelled land speculation. Whereas areas designated as "housing areas" have an average price of about EUR 180/m2 in Flanders (2014), the value of land zoned as agricultural land swings between EUR 4–5/m2. This financial aspect makes changing the planned land use in Flanders particularly challenging.

#### **Flood Risks Policy (Instruments) Flood Risk Policy in Flanders**

The Flemish policy on flood risk prevention is regulated by the 2003 Decree on Integrated Water Policy and the policy framework of 2005 and 2013, which assign implementation to the European Water Framework Directive of 2000. Severe floodings in 2010 and 2011 marked an increased policy attention to flood risk control but also a "window of opportunity" to implement another approach. Traditional technical flood protection policies oriented toward protection by dikes, retention basins and water pumping installations have been complemented by prevention and NBS with natural flooding areas and "natural" retention areas. This more ecological approach affects land use policy and in particular areas that are designated for housing and industry in flood risk areas.

The government has established a policy framework in 2013 to deal with new developments in flood-prone areas. In this context, the concept of "signal areas" (*signaalgebieden*) has been created: these are areas designated for industry or housing and with a potential impact on the water system. If after a further analysis it is concluded that flood damage risk increases when the area is developed according to the zoning designation, then the Flemish government concludes that this area needs a follow-up phase. In this follow-up phase, the Flemish government determines the development perspective for the area. Three development options are possible:

Based on intensive discussions between the spatial planning department of the Flemish Government and other departments within the Coordination Commission on Integrated Water Policy, 3338 ha of land have now been labelled as signal area. About 2473 ha fall under development option C and need to be rezoned.

#### *Instruments for Land Use Management in Flood-Prone Areas*

The policy framework on the signal areas proposes a number of policy instruments to restrict and prohibit building in flood-prone areas. In the option A and option B areas, a number of instruments intend to prevent or mitigate the impact of new construction.

For option C areas, zoning designations have to be changed, and more drastic instruments are needed. Zoning designations can be changed by spatial implementation plans or*ruimtelijke uitvoeringsplannen*. The Codex on spatial planning regulates the procedure, which foresees a public inquiry, and multiple rounds of advisements from both government administrations and advisory commissions. The procedure typically takes 2–3 years; implementation plans for more complex projects can even last 10 years. Implementation plans can be initiated by the municipal, provincial and regional level as long as they fit within their strategic structure plan. Implementation plans are also subject to environmental impact studies, which are regulated by separate environmental legalization.

Moreover, the 1962 Act and the later Codex protected landowners from value destruction as a result of rezoning in implementation plans with the instrument of plan compensation (*planschade*). Landowners that are faced with rezoning are compensated for 80% of the acquired value at current prices. Moreover, when option C is decided for a flood-prone area, it must be determined which level of the government (municipal, provincial or regional) has to take the initiative to start the procedure to make a spatial implementation plan or *ruimtelijk uitvoeringsplan*. Important to mention is that plan compensations have to be paid by the government level that takes the initiative. Local governments can rely on regional subsidies, but only for up to 60% of the costs for the plan compensations.

Because of the complexity of the instrument and the financial implications, governments are mostly reluctant to use implementation plans. An evaluation of the progress of redesignation in 83 signal areas found that for three quarters of the signal areas that need planning redesignation, procedures to develop spatial implementation plans had not been initiated yet. The Flemish government initiated 16 regional spatial implementation plans on signal areas; some provincial governments have also made spatial implementation plans on water-prone areas; but for municipal governments, it proved very difficult to redesignate water-prone areas via spatial implementation plans. The municipal governments indicate as a main reason a lack of clarity about the financial consequences and the fear for having to pay (large amounts of) financial compensations due to the development restrictions for landowners. While municipal governments are hesitant to initiate spatial implementation plan procedures, waterprone area are being developed, leading to high(er) risks of flood damage in these areas.

#### *Flood Prone Open Space Areas as a Bypass*

In order to safeguard water-prone areas from further development, the Flemish government recently introduced the instrument of "flood prone open area spaces". With this instrument, the Flemish government has made it possible to change the current designation of signal areas to open space area. The "open space" designation leaves open which particular designation the area will receive (nature, agriculture, soft recreation…), but firmly confirms that the area cannot be developed. Some small developments will still be allowed, such as building little shelters as bus stops or building a functional road through the area, but high value development with residential homes and industry will not be allowed. Which areas will receive a flood-prone open space area designation will not be decided upon in a spatial implementation plan but in a circular note of the Flemish government.

Giving signal areas the planning designation of a flood-prone open space area via a circular note of the Flemish government has many advantages: (1) the responsibility to change planning designation is shifted from other governments towards the Flemish government, which releases more local governments from making unpopular decisions in complex spatial implementation plan procedures; (2) it adds speed to the process of taking away development rights in signal areas; (3) it creates more clarity and legal security for landowners who own land that is labelled as signal area; and (4) it enables a more centralized and uniform financial compensation policy for landowners who lose development rights.

The Flemish government decides which signal areas will receive a flood-prone open space area designation based on a suggestion by the Coordination Commission on Integrated Water Policy, in which not only the spatial department of the Flemish government but also provinces, municipalities and many other governmental agencies are represented. The decision on which planning redesignation will be assigned—by means of spatial implementation plans or by means of a circular note on water prone open space areas—will be made pragmatically. If procedures for spatial implementation plans have already been initiated, then signal areas will get a planning redesignation by means of a spatial implementation plan. If not, a circular note will be the alternative.

#### *The Biggest Challenge for Implementing the Flood Prone Open Space Area Policy*

The 2013 policy framework located the financial responsibility for compensating landowners in flood-prone areas at the government level that takes the initiative to make an implementation plan. In the new regulation, the minister for spatial planning has expressed that all compensations would be financed by the regional level. Moreover, the landowner will receive a financial compensation—not based on indexation of the purchase price but on the actual market value of the land. This means that financial compensation for losing development rights risks will become much more expensive for the Flemish government because purchase prices of land (even though indexated) are much lower than the actual market value of land. The spatial planning department therefore is urged to build more expertise in determining the actual market value of land by trying to systematically estimate the market value price of flood-prone signal area land. In these exercises, the spatial planning department starts off with the idea that market prices of signal areas are in practice lower because buyers anticipate that governments will not allow building on that land due to the signal area status.

The high cost of financially compensating the loss of development rights, together with the lack of experience and expertise on determining actual market prices of signal area land, are—at this moment—important potential drawbacks in implementing the flood-prone open space area policy of the Flemish government.

#### **Are There Alternatives to Implementation Plans?**

Because of the bureaucratic complexity and the financial impact of implementation plans, the Flemish government has decided to develop complementary and alternative instruments.

#### *Trading Development Rights*

A new decree is underway with instruments to create a "market place" to trade development rights. The instrument of transferable development rights differentiates between sending areas and receiving areas; owners of flood-prone areas (sending areas) are compensated by owners buying development rights in the receiving areas.

In Flanders, municipal governments in particular are interested in the transferable development rights instrument.When a market place is created (when the transferable development rights-instrument is implemented), municipalities are relieved from the burden of financially compensating landowners because owners of areas receiving development rights financially compensate the owners of the sending areas.

The idea of transferring development rights on a "market place" is not really convincing for many. One has the illusion that the transferable development rights instrument would help to limit or take away development rights on land that should ideally not be built on, but it probably will not. Neither the owners of sending land nor the owners of receiving land seem to be very enthusiastic. (a) Owners of the sending area are not very keen on entering a market where the price of their land and/or development rights depend on the demand of others. They feel much more comfortable with the option that the government would fully financially compensate them for the loss of development rights and do not want to risk a volatile "bidding" among owners over receiving areas. (b) Owners of receiving areas do not have a proper incentive to pay for extra development rights on their land (e.g., building higher apartments), because the development rights on their (receiving) land already are rather permissive. Or, to put it differently, they are not pushed by "scarcity" that prevented them from paying for extra developments rights. They do not want to pay for something that is already allowed anyway.

Furthermore, scientific research concluded that the instrument of transferable development rights is not prohibiting open space to be built on (Ruimte Vlaanderen 2016; Van den Nieuwenhof 2016). Van den Nieuwenhof found that in order to withdraw the development rights of one piece of land, you have to attribute seven development rights in receiving areas in order to make the transfer of development rights financially interesting for the owners. Again, the main reason for that is that regulations on developments were and are quite permissive in Flanders. For example, many apartment buildings have been built in Flanders recently. This has caused an oversupply of apartments in the real property market. Developers are not interested in building higher apartment blocks, as they cannot find buyers. This makes attracting extra development rights not very interesting for them.

#### *Mandatory Land Readjustment, Including Swapping Designation Zones*

Land readjustment has been a common practice in many countries for decades (van der Krabben and Needham 2008). In Flanders, its purpose until now has been dominantly to pool fragmented properties and to redistribute property rights more efficiently. Typical applications are in agricultural and nature zones where parcels of land are swapped between the owners. The government delineates a district in which land reparcelling is possible, and, under the coordination of a government (land) agency, property owners are invited to collaborate and bring in their land as investment capital. In return, the agency commits to giving each owner a land site of at least equal value in the vicinity of the original site upon the completion of the land reparcelling project.

In case of mandatory land readjustment, the government puts land readjustment on the agenda to create a solution for problems with the planned land use and its associated development rights. There are now a few emerging cases using the instrument to relocate development rights in flood-prone areas. In these cases, the government is eager to swap planning designations between parcels/landowners, in order to prevent flood-prone areas from being developed (further). In these cases, the landowners remain landowners (no expropriation) but are financially compensated for the loss of development rights on their land by swapping planning designations between parcels/landowners, for example, swapping building rights for rights to use the land as agricultural land.

The difference between the classic land reparcelling and the new mandatory land readjustment is that in classic land reparcelling it is about land with "soft" planning designations (such as agriculture and nature) while the mandatory land readjustment brings about an exchange of designations between land with soft designations and hard designations (e.g., residential area or industry zone) where development rights should be revoked.

The idea of mandatory land readjustment provokes the interest of municipal governments, mainly because of financial reasons. In contrast to paying financial compensations in case of a spatial implementation plan, municipalities are not obliged to compensate landowners that lose development rights. When designations are exchanged between parcels/landowners, owners are paid in real values.

In practice, however, the mandatory land readjustment is not expected to be a success. Many reasons can explain this.

#### **In Summary: Market- and Commons-Led Initiatives Are not yet a True Alternative for a Central Government-Led Approach**

From the Flemish context we learn that (re)allocating development rights through central government-led initiatives with financial compensations is still considered the best approach, because it is the fastest way to avoid (further) development of flood-prone areas and because it is an appealing scenario for municipal governments and landowners. A big drawback to these central government-led initiatives is that committing to these financial compensation carries the risk of becoming too great a financial burden, in particular when the government financially compensates at the rate of the actual market value of the land.

Even though Flanders is working with innovative instruments like trading development rights and exchange of development rights, they are not expected to fulfil the promise of becoming a true alternative for the central government-led initiatives. The main reason for that is that incentives to trade development rights or pool land are lacking since landowners do not see the advantage of participating in trade or pooling.

**Acknowledgements** Open access of this chapter is funded by COST Action No. CA16209 Natural flood retention on private land, LAND4FLOOD (www.land4flood.eu), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

#### **References**

**Ann Crabbé** is guest professor and senior researcher at the Research Centre for Environmental and Social Change at the Sociology department of the University of Antwerp (Belgium). Her research interests include institutional stability and dynamics in the governance of flood risks. After her Ph.D. on institutionalizing the river basin approach in Flanders, she was involved in several regional and European projects on water quality policies and flood risk governance.

**Tom Coppens** is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Antwerp and coordinator of the master programme in urban planning and design. He is an expert in planning instruments and spatial governance processes in Flanders and opinion maker on urban planning policy. His research focus lies on tradable development rights and planning instruments for the reallocation of building rights.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Chapter 10 Commentary: Swapping Development Rights to Prevent Flood Plain Development in Flanders: A Legal Architecture Perspective**

**John Sheehan**

#### **Introduction**

Nature-based solutions for FRM are unavoidably impacted by the particularity of overarching national property laws and, especially, local property ownership and land use patterns. Crabbé and Coppens (this volume) in their paper "*Swapping development rights in swampy land: strategic instruments/strategies to prevent flood plain development in Flanders*" have chosen to respond to the question of particularity of property laws through the lens of flood plain development in the northern Belgian region of Flanders. In reflecting on the question of particularity in as much as it relates to NBS in FRM, I have also chosen a distinct approach that, however, eschews (without any overt or covert judgement) the empirical approach of Crabbé and Coppens.

This commentary is therefore imbedded with theoretical underpinnings of property rights that are, in any event, arguably and, indeed necessarily, informed by pragmatic legal considerations. To that end, the commentary changes gears but does not dismiss the road map evidenced in the empirical approach adopted in the Flanders case study. There are no broad rules or generalizations for NBS for FRM, and hence any conclusions must be absolutely neutral and objective. Crabbé and Coppens refer to the overall impact of the *gewestplannen* on land prices, and the resultant difficulties encountered in any changes to planned land uses presumably to address flood risks. Different disciplines necessitate consideration of FRM from a particular standpoint. Crabbé and Coppens appear to come from such a particular standpoint, providing an empirical consideration of FRM through an examination of the various opportunities available for governance of flood planning management through either

J. Sheehan (B)

Faculty of Social and Economic Studies, Institute for Economic and Environmental Policy (IEEP), J. E. Purkynˇe University, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Faculty of Society and Design, Bond University, Gold Coast, Australia

<sup>©</sup> The Author(s) 2019

T. Hartmann et al. (eds.), *Nature-Based Flood Risk Management on Private Land*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23842-1\_10

market-driven instruments or, alternatively, government-led initiatives; essentially a land use planning discourse.

The issue of selection of the appropriate FRM governance models is, however, not exceptional, yet neither is the process of selection commonly encountered. Perhaps the task of ascertaining NBS for FRM necessitates an unexpected or even unanticipated focus on the process of selection of suitable and efficacious governance models in such specific circumstances. The impact upon private property rights ought not to be underestimated, and hence, from my perspective, the legal architecture surrounding any NBS for FRM is the touchstone for effectivity and efficiency. Whilst not suggesting any disrespect to other disciplines, the legal architecture could be described as the *liet motif* of any NBS for FRM on private land. Indeed, Crabbé and Coppens recognise this aspect to some degree when they note the reality of the oversupplied Flanders marketplace, which is adversely impacting the utility of possible transferable development rights for FRM. They also note mandatory land adjustment for FRM is similarly infused with the reality of the value of land in the hands of private owners who are unwilling to lose any value through the adjustment process.

Aside from FRM, even globally significant endeavours such as archaeology have also been impacted by the value of private land. For example, the governmentsanctioned excavation in the 1890s by French archaeologists of the ancient Greek sanctuary of Delphi was delayed by some of three hundred dispossessed villagers who argued for better compensation for their private land beneath which lay the (now) UNESCO World Heritage Site (Cline 2017, 178). Unsurprisingly, with private property rights whirling around prospective NBS for FRM, the legal architecture is revealed as paramount.

#### **Legal Architecture**

Crabbé and Coppens determine that NBS for FRM in the face of perhaps significant financial compensation appropriately accruing to holders of private property is the major challenge for municipal, provincial and regional governments in Flanders. However, an understanding of the impact of NBS for FRM upon private property rights must first be nominally grounded in the constitutive conditions—social, legal, and institutional. Then secondly, the specific territorial composition of the conditions will subsequently confer legality and legitimacy upon those remedies considered appropriate to the particular territory. Such a starting point transposes the common narrative of the scientifically-informed foundation of FRM to a very different narrative of territorial politico-legal innovation within the reality of the driver of change, such as climate (Van Straalen et al. 2018, 190). The legal architecture of flood-prone areas in Flanders (and indeed, elsewhere) provides an important necessary impulse for the selection of the appropriate policy (instrument) to achieve the eagerly sought after NBS for FRM. Hence, the selection process is imbedded with the recognition that much flood-prone land is more often than not held as private property rights. I would argue that the common analytical distinctions between public environmental law and the law of private property ought not lead to presumptions that the legal architecture is so separate as to be irreconcilable, especially when tasked crucially with identifying a methodology (or methodologies) for FRM.

Indeed, whether the overarching legal architecture is based in a civil code regime such as in Belgium or a common law regime such as in England appears increasingly irrelevant, notably in environmental law. Convergence of intent allied with international law has increasingly overcome lingering conceptual historic obstacles thereby rendering omnibus environmental law recognizable and legitimate (Girard 2016; Needham et al. 2018, 53). Beyond Europe, this increasing irrelevance of legal genealogy is also manifested in the Asian Pacific region where notwithstanding the marked legal and political diversity of regional nation states, Couzens and Stephens detect "a number of common strands in the way in which governments in the region are approaching environmental challenges" (Couzens and Stephens 2017, 1).

Returning to the case study, the constitutive conditions—social, legal, institutional—clearly empower the municipal, provincial and regional governments in Flanders, and yet an overarching politico-legal remedy for NBS for FRM especially on private land appears to be remote. Firstly, why is this so? Secondly, why there are such almost intractable difficulties with implementation of broad-scale NBS for FRM in Flanders (and elsewhere)? From a property rights standpoint, the answer to both questions lies in a failure to appreciate any nature-based solution for FRM on private land is necessarily imbedded with theoretical underpinnings of property rights informed by pragmatic legal considerations. Perhaps, such a response merely reveals how the legal mind approaches the requisite accommodation flagged between FRM and private property rights. Possessive individualism lies at the heart of the theory of private property rights in respect of which Macpherson stated: "human society is essentially a series of market relations" (Macpherson 1962, 270). Nevertheless, Crabbé and Coppens appear uncomfortable with alternatives to government-led initiatives for FRM such as market-driven instruments notably transferable development rights or mandatory land readjustment. Yet, such alternatives represent a suite of tools that, in appropriate circumstances, can respond effectively to the presence of private property rights and address the significant financial worth of such privately held rights. Nonetheless, it is known that alternatives to government-led initiatives cannot serve as panacea for all management needs when flood risk has to be confronted.

Whilst somewhat prosaic, it is important to recognise NBS for FRM necessitate intervening in private property rights, and, ordinarily one can anticipate that to need significantly more land than more traditional flood risk "grey infrastructure" would require. Nevertheless, in a heartening observation Freyfogle stated: "private property, in fact, has been an evolving, organic institution with ownership rights that have varied greatly from era to era and place to place. The vast potential for further change of this institution very much needs exploring" (Freyfogle 2003, 7).

#### **Research and Practice Questions Arising**

Unsurprisingly, private property rights have always presented a conundrum for liberal-democratic states such as Belgium, Australia, or elsewhere. Freyfogle has further stated, "one has to do with the mismatch between the way private land is portrayed in law and culture and the way it exists in the real world of nature" (Freyfogle 2003, 7). This dual view of land, which includes private property rights, reveals national property law can only be ignored perilously by other disciplines when contemplating such issues as NBS to FRM on private land. The solutions sought after will only be realized through a cross-disciplinary collaboration between the perspectives offered by law and other disciplines where private land is to be the focus of the solution. The Flanders case study reveals existing attempts to introduce NBS for FRM utilizing private land frankly remain inefficient and probably in the main, ineffective. Because the question of particularity of property law impacts so severely on the prospect for efficiency and effectiveness, I consider the Flanders case study clearly reveals a need for urgent collaborative cross-disciplinary research into the theory and practice of flood risk mitigation and adaptation measures, notably where intervention in private property rights is required.

**Acknowledgements** Open access of this chapter is funded by COST Action No. CA16209 Natural flood retention on private land, LAND4FLOOD (www.land4flood.eu), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

#### **References**

**Prof. John Sheehan** is currently Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building at University of Technology Sydney. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Society and Design at Bond University, Gold Coast, Queensland. In 2017, John was appointed Guest Professor with the Institute for Economic and Environmental Policy (IEEP) in the Faculty of Social and Economic Studies at J. E. Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem, Czech Republic. In 2003 he was appointed the independent Chair of the Project Advisory Committee Water Property Titles Program, Land and Water Australia, which was a research project funded by the Commonwealth Government to establish a water titling system for Australia.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Chapter 11 Commentary: An Economic View on the Prospects of a Flood Defense Related Development Rights Market in Flanders**

**András Kis and Gábor Ungvári**

Economic instruments have been increasingly favoured by decision makers in the field of environmental and water policy, as they can provide efficient, low-cost solutions compared to command and control or traditional legal instruments. Such instruments, however, are not without problems. Even relatively simple solutions, for instance, environmental taxes, can backfire if their design, monitoring or enforcement is problematic, while more sophisticated instruments, such as market-based solutions, need even more thoughtful design and implementation to become successful. Some instruments look attractive on paper but are cumbersome or not operational in reality. The Flemish attempt at tradable development rights provides a suitable illustration of the practical difficulties of introducing an economic instrument that seeks to solve a problem through the creation and operation of a new environmental market.

#### **The Origins of Demand and Supply**

In Flanders, an economic solution to changing zoning designations was sought because government-initiated, forced rezoning had proven to be tedious and slow and require large financial compensations. In the proposed market, the development right can be decoupled from the land that is destined to be rezoned, and this right can be purchased by other landowners who are located in areas where development is not restricted. The traded commodity is the development right itself. The problem with this solution from an economic perspective is the gap between supply and demand in the case of Flanders. Supply can be offered by landowners who are located in flood-prone areas with restricted development options, whose development rights

A. Kis (B) · G. Ungvári

Regional Centre for Energy Policy Research, Budapest, Hungary e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
G. Ungvári e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
were granted many years ago. In these areas, land with development rights is much more expensive than land without such rights, and this difference is the perceived value of the right itself that landowners would like to fetch in case they sell it.

Demand is generated by landowners outside of flood-prone areas who would like to develop their land. These actors, however, usually have other, cheaper alternatives than buying development rights from areas that are to be rezoned. As Crabbé and Coppens suggest, many developers can acquire such rights from their respective local authorities without much hassle and at a relatively low price. Therefore, there is little demand for development rights, and even that demand is priced low. No wonder that supply and demand cannot really meet.

#### **How Could the Government Stimulate the Market?**

In such a situation, an economist may wonder if demand and supply can be bridged through government intervention. A specific sort of intervention could be of administrative nature—restricting the issue of new development rights throughout Flanders for a set period of time, in order to provide incentives for the market-based transfer of these rights from flood-prone areas to other locations. The feasibility of this option is not clear to us, but we imagine it may create much dissatisfaction among developers.

Another alternative is that of a subsidy. Since the traditional approach is for the government to pay landowners to give up their rights, the government may as well pay market participants to facilitate transactions in the development rights market, thus reducing the price for the buyer or increasing the revenue for the seller. As the payment by the government can be lower than the usual practice of compensation based on land prices, the government can also benefit from this solution.

A related critical question, however, is not addressed in the paper: what is the value of the flood safety generated by rezoning the targeted land parcels? This value should act as a ceiling to any payment by the government, whether that payment is a direct compensation to landowners, or a subsidy to facilitate development right market transactions. There is discussion of the average expected annual damage due to flooding (50 million EUR/year in Flanders), but how much of this could be averted through land rezoning, is not clear. This information may not exist at all; however, it would be important to research it, as it would make an essential contribution to economically sound government flood policy.

#### **An Alternative Solution: Auction-Based Purchase of Rights**

Lastly, let us mention another alternative to the market of development rights, since its implementation obviously faces serious challenges. The government could consider auctions to purchase development rights from landowners in flood-prone areas. Participation by landowners would be voluntary, and participants would offer their development rights at a price that they consider high enough from their own perspective (their "reservation price"). Since different quantities would be offered at different prices, essentially a supply curve of development rights would be created, assuming that enough landowners participate in the auction. Demand by the government, on the other hand, would reflect the value of the public benefits of reduced flood risk, acting as a price ceiling at the auction. If the government makes it clear that these auctions represent the new main policy for rezoning, then landowners will start to offer their development rights since their revenue would be immediate and certain, while full future compensation based on real estate prices is uncertain. This type of certainty would likely help to drive down the purchase price of the rights. Regular auctions, such as annual ones, would be helpful: they would spread the financial burden of the government to several years while at the same time building trust in this new regulatory instrument and allowing landowners to learn about the auction mechanisms by studying already completed auctions. There are various auction types; the actual choice obviously would require a deeper analysis of the Flemish situation.

#### **Some Prerequisites to Successful Environmental Markets**

One of the lessons of this case study is that economic instruments are attractive in theory, but their practical implementation is not always viable, especially in the case of a legally complicated matter such as rezoning of inherited rights. There are also other obstacles, such as the standardisation of the traded product, connecting buyers and sellers, keeping transaction costs low. The number of trading transactions is also of importance: a relatively low number would probably not justify the efforts of establishing a market with all of its institutional requirements. In such a situation, looking for alternative solutions makes sense, including other, less complex economic instruments through which the economic efficiency could still be enhanced.

Another lesson is that developing market-based solutions requires a thorough prior understanding of the envisioned market by investigating questions such as the following: Who are the buyers and sellers? What is their motivation? What alternatives do they have compared to entering the market? Is the product to be traded well defined and understandable for all stakeholders? Would supply and demand likely meet—in other words, is there a scarcity that would drive supply and demand toward each other? Would there be enough participants in the market to make it liquid? How can transparency be ensured? Which institution would be in charge of registering transactions? How would administrative costs be financed?

Finally, even comprehensive research and preparation may not be sufficient to properly design economic instruments from the beginning. The experience with water markets (e.g., in Australia, USA), emission markets (most prominently carbon markets) and effluent discharge trading schemes (especially in the USA) promptly illustrates that a large part of the success of these solutions lies in their ability to evaluate participant feedback, adapt and evolve: learning by doing is often an inevitable component of realising the efficiency gains offered by economic instruments.

As we can see, the efforts required to create well-operating markets are substantial. The potential benefits, however, are also huge: properly designed and implemented market-based instruments can activate a large number of transactions, delivering valuable economic gains to a wide circle of buyers and sellers.

**Acknowledgements** Open access of this chapter is funded by COST Action No. CA16209 Natural flood retention on private land, LAND4FLOOD (www.land4flood.eu), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology).

**Andras Kis** is a water economist at REKK, a think tank at the Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary. He has 20 years of experience working as an environmental economist in Hungary, Central and Eastern European countries and the Middle East North Africa region. For the past 10 years his main focus has been water economics, including water utility regulation, assessment of economic policy instruments, cost-benefit analyses of flood protection measures, and benchmarking of water services.

**Gábor Ungvári** is senior water economist at the water economics unit of REKK in the Corvinus University of Budapest. Since 1999 he has worked in a series of water-resource focused, interdisciplinary research and economic consultancy programs. His analytical work (among many) targets FRM and the regulatory aspects of WFD measures. He is a member of the Scientific Council of the National Water Directorate of Hungary.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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## Part V Wetlands Restoration in Czech Republic

## **Chapter 12 Urban Wetlands Restoration in Floodplains: A Case of the City of Pilsen, Czech Republic**

**Jan Macháˇc and Jiˇrí Louda**

The chapter deals with the importance of implementing small-scale NBS for flood protection in cities. It turns out that, although NBS bring multiple environmental and social co-benefits, their real-world implementation comes up against numerous barriers, particularly if private land is needed for their implementation. Insufficient awareness of the benefits of such measures reduces stakeholders' willingness to consider their implementation (including negotiations with private owners about provision of land for these purposes). If it is necessary to use private land for NBS implementation in cities (thus public funds for compensations to the private owners), the social benefits of such measures have to be demonstrated to stakeholders in a clear and transparent manner. In regard to the case study of Lobezská louka, where an NBS in the form of urban wetlands has already been partly implemented, we demonstrate the potential of economic assessment in the form of a cost-benefit analysis to facilitate decision-making for further application of NBS in cities. In our case, the analysis showed that the social benefits of the measure realized in the first phase exceed the costs 25 times. The result is a supporting argument for implementation of the next two phases on private land.

#### **Introduction**

Urban areas are among territories where manifestations of climate change have very significant adverse (economic) impacts, and adaptation to such change (in the form

J. Macháˇc (B) · J. Louda

Faculty of Social and Economic Studies, Institute for Economic and Environmental Policy (IEEP), J. E. Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem (UJEP), Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
J. Louda e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
of more frequent floods or droughts, heat waves or urban heat islands) incurs considerable social costs.

Until recently, "traditional" adaptation of cities to climate change has relied mostly on technical measures ("grey infrastructure") such as mobile flood barriers, canalisation/culverting of watercourses, construction of dams and dikes (upstream of the city), insulation of building envelopes, and installation of air-conditioning. Alternative solutions to technical measures are NBS, which can be seen as complements to technical measures and can be implemented directly in the urban area. "The fundamental belief is that NBS can represent more efficient and cost-effective solutions than traditional approaches" (Lafortezza et al. 2017). One of the reasons is that implementation of NBS may bring multiple co-benefits (McVittie et al. 2018) improving the well-being of inhabitants. More widespread application of NBS in cities also has strong support from the European Commission (Faivre et al. 2017). Ever more cities thus reach for NBS, although their implementation does face numerous barriers. Once of them is the space requirement of NBS. Compared to grey infrastructure, these measures tend to interfere with privately-owned land more often.

This chapter is focused on the main challenges of and obstacles to NBS1 implementation as part of flood event adaptation in cities from an economic and institutional point of view (assuming that the city's goal is to build a conceptual system of flood protection). From this point of view, the main question can be defined as follows: How to support the planning and implementation process of NBS in cities, especially if they should be implemented (at least partly) on private land? One possible solution is demonstrated on a case study of the city of Pilsen. This city decided to implement NBS to solve its flood protection.

In general, awareness about NBS and the benefits brought by their implementation is limited. Solving this issue involves three different levels of stakeholders:

Implementation of flood protection measures (and especially "novel" measures such as NBS) depends heavily on support from decision makers and other stakeholders. This means that one of the main challenges is to convince the municipal government of the benefits and importance of NBS implementation, because members of the municipal government make the decisions on spending the public budget. Politicians prefer short-term results compared to long-term ones due to the political cycle and the effort to be re-elected. In the current term, the decision makers have shown preference for measures related to recreation. Moreover, in the last three years, the Czech Republic has been more affected by droughts than by floods. Floods are thus not perceived as a significant risk, or at least not by the current municipal representation. This is in contradiction with the extensive damage caused by floods in the previous 20 years.

<sup>1</sup>Or sometimes referred to as nature-based flood protection measures (NFPM).

Another important issue for a city's successful adaptation is related to private ownership of land in cities. A large part of land in urban areas is owned by private entities. Designing and implementing measures on (previously) private land seems to be a key challenge on the road to a successful adaptation process. Decision makers are restrained from negotiating with private owners, because transaction costs and compensations to landowners for using the land for NBS increase the time and costs of implementation.

A third group of stakeholders is composed of entities that are not directly involved in the process of NBS implementation but may significantly influence the results of negotiations about new measures, such as creating a new urban wetland. NGOs often have a strong position in the civil society and can influence local inhabitants' perception regarding NBS. On the other hand, many entities in public administration (such as a municipal environmental or urban development department) are either directly involved in the decision-making process, or prepare inputs for the municipal government.