Swedish environmental quality criteria

Sweden has recently presented a new system of Environmental Quality Criteria(EQC) that are expected to support a flexible, goal-oriented approach toenvironmental management. The EQC of surface water may serve as the basisfor implementing the European Union's Water Framework Directive (WFD) inSweden. Useful as EQC can be for establishing management priorities andmonitoring changes over time, though, there is a long-standing concern that thesimplifications inherent in assessment systems such as EQC compromise theirvalue. One manifestation of this concern was the two decades of active debatebefore the official adoption by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency in1990. Understanding the concerns which led to this delay may provide usefulinsights into the challenges of implementing EQC and even the WFD. The aimof this thesis is to improve the understanding of EQC and their implementationby examining the EQC from both scientific and management perspectives. Thisis done by first presenting a case study of how the new surface water EQC areapplied in river basin, and then through a historical study of the decades leadingup to the official adoption of the first surface water EQC. The historical studyfound that it was not so much a definitive resolution of any scientific problems,but rather developments in management strategies, together with a change in thenature of the environmental problems facing Sweden, that were of most importancefor EQC finally being not only sanctioned, but touted in 1999 as a key featureof future environmental management in Sweden. The river basin case studyfound that EQC could make a valuable contribution to environmental assessment,particularly by bringing a broader spectrum of managers, stakeholders andpoliticians into contact with environmental data and a coherent overview of thesituation in a region. The value of that contribution, however, is contingent uponan expert review of the results that identifies potential problems in the specificEQC application where greater expertise is required for a satisfactory assessment.