Lessons From Spanish and US Law for Adequate Regulation of Groundwater Protection Areas in Chile, Especially Drinking Water Deposits

Verónica Delgado (), José Luis Arumi () and Oscar Reicher ()
Additional contact information
Verónica Delgado: School of Legal and Social Sciences of the University of Concepcion
José Luis Arumi: School of Agricultural Engineering and CRHIAM of the University of Concepcion
Oscar Reicher: School of Legal and Social Sciences of the University of Concepcion

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA), 2017, vol. 31, issue 14, No 20, 4699-4713

Abstract: Abstract The hypothesis of the present work is that the groundwater regulations of the Chilean Water Code are insufficient because they look only at quantitative aspects of interest to owners of water rights, but do not serve to protect the quality of the aquifer as a common good. To prove this hypothesis, a legal and technical review of how groundwater catchment protection areas are regulated in Spanish and US law, especially when used for human consumption, was carried out. After this review, we contrasted these regulations with Chilean standards, particularly the Water Code and Supreme Decree 203 of 2013. We concluded that there are at least two substantial differences: a) Chilean legislation does not impose any restrictions on the establishment of polluting activities near the drinking water collection point, emphasizing the quantity of the resource rather than the protection of its quality. The law prevents only the opening of new groundwater collection points near the first. In addition, b) the protection area is not variable; it always remains the same regardless of the intended objective, site characteristics or the speed at which a contaminant advances.

Keywords: Protection areas; Groundwater; Water for human consumption; Protection perimeters; Groundwater catchments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11269-017-1761-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:waterr:v:31:y:2017:i:14:d:10.1007_s11269-017-1761-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11269

DOI: 10.1007/s11269-017-1761-z

Access Statistics for this article

Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) is currently edited by G. Tsakiris

More articles in Water Resources Management: An International Journal, Published for the European Water Resources Association (EWRA) from Springer, European Water Resources Association (EWRA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().