Do Water Management and Climate-Adapted Management of Wetlands Interfere in Practice? Lessons from the Biebrza Valley, Poland - Wetlands and Water Framework Directive: Protection, Management and Climate Change - page 61

especially in the periods of drought (Grygoruk et al. 2014b ), which are foreseen to
occur more frequently in the future.
Implementation of the National Water-Environment Programme requires fund-
ing. Noteworthy, according to the information given in the NWEP ( 2010 ), only four
out of eight groups of actions have particular budget assigned (Fig. 4.3 b). The most
signi cant share of funding is related to the sewage management which also

expresses the high priority of this group of actions (Fig. 4.3 a). Surprisingly, the
actions related to the afforestation have also received the signi

financial
contribution which may be considered unproportional, if the number of all the
actions provided by the National Water-Environment Programme was considered.
Remaining actions foreseen in this document are to be implemented within the
existing budgets of local authorities and external projects and no additional funding
originating from the pure implementation of the WFD implementation is planned.
Among them there are actions oriented at the enhancement of agriculture, direct
water management and environmental conservation. Analyzing the structure and
content of NWEP ( 2010 ) one can conclude that no particular attention is paid to the
potential climate-related challenges to WFD implementation.

cant

4.5 What Is Missing?

The major flaw of the set of actions analysed above is that majority of proposed

measures are economy-oriented (e.g. majority of funding is related to the forthcoming
actions consisting of the construction works such as sewage treatment systems).
Actions related to the improvement of the environmental quality which deteriorated
as a response of ecosystems to the former stresses, such as hydromorphological
changes of river channels (dredging, land reclamation, lowering water levels), are in
general omitted. This re

fl

finding of Dembek ( 2015 ) who claims that the
balance of water-related policies should switch from the anthropocentric approaches
towards the attitudes considering the environment as a priority. In this regard one can
also conclude that the climate-related threats of the ecosystems are not anticipated by
the National Water-Environment Programme (NWEP 2010 ). No direct attention is
paid to the prospective changes in the recurrence of

fl ects the

fl floods and droughts, which,

together with stationary approach to the environmental flows, may result in inevitable

changes of ecosystems dependent on groundwater and base

fl

fl ow (among them there

are all aquatic ecosystems that keep to be under stress in low low periods). The fact

that the regional plans of irrigation and drainage, which in general assume the
improvement of the function of draining role of land reclamation systems and rivers
(and thus may multiply the negative effects of droughts) also do not keep to be in the
accordance with the requirements of WFD, HD, BD and

fl

— —

also with
the National Water-Environment Programme. This was already proven in numerous
reports (e.g. Biere

surprisingly

noj-Bazille and Grygoruk 2013 ; Mioduszewski and Okruszko
2012 ). Wishing to keep aquatic ecosystems of the region of Biebrza Catchment in a
good ecological status, assuring their resilience to prospective climate-related

ż