The sustainable management of aquatic ecosystems requires better coordination between policies span-ning freshwater, coastal and marine environments. Ecosystem-based management (EBM) has been promoted as a holistic and integrative approach for the safekeeping and protection of aquatic biodiversity. The paper assesses the degree to which key European environmental policies for the aquatic environment, namely the Birds and Habitats Directives, Water Framework Directive and Marine Strategy Framework Directive, individually support EBM and can work synergistically to implement EBM. This assessment is based on a review of legal texts, EU guidance and implementation documents. The paper concludes that EBM can be made operational by implementing these key environmental directives. Opportunities for improving the integration of EU environmental policies are highlighted.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13280-017-0928-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The EC Water Framework Directive (WFD) sets ambitious quality targets for member state water bodies by 2015. The provisions are being transposed predominantly using a cost-effectiveness criterion, which raises questions about the relative balance of costs [of reaching good status (GS)] and corresponding (non-)market benefits or the economic efficiency of the legislation. This study provides an insight into public perceptions of water quality improvements based on an application of national characterisation data on the state of the water environment in Scotland. A choice experiment approach is used to quantify non-market benefits of achieving GS across Scottish rivers and lochs over varying timescales and different geographical levels, with the aim of revealing willingnessto-pay data that is specifically relevant for WFD implementation. We find that the benefits of implementing the WFD are substantial. Results show that geographical differences in preferences for national improvements in the river and loch water quality in Scotland exist, both in terms of magnitudes of benefit estimates and time preferences for improvements. These differences need to be taken into account in analyses at the river basin district or national level in order to support policy options for the implementation of the WFD across the country.

No abstract

Environmental problems are very often wicked problems: they are persistent, they have no clear end, and involve moral choices resulting in winners and losers. Just as the ecological and biological elements of these problems are dynamic and complex, so the social and political elements are also constantly changing and do not follow linear patterns. Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM) is an approach developed to work on wicked problems that recognizes social-ecological systems and the need to incorporate systems thinking into natural resource management. In this chapter we describe the scope and scale of this book and briefly discuss its four sections:

Global aquatic biodiversity keeps declining rapidly, despite international efforts providing a variety of policies and legislations that identify goals for, and give directions to protecting the world's aquatic fauna and flora. With the H2020 project AQUACROSS, we have made an unprecedented effort to unify policy strategies, knowledge, and management concepts of freshwater, coastal, and marine ecosystems to support the achievement of the targets set by the EU Biodiversity Strategy to 2020. AQUACROSS has embraced the concept of ecosystembased management (EBM), which approaches environmental management from a social-ecological system perspective to protect biodiversity and to sustainably harvest ecosystem services. This special issue includes contributions resulting from AQUACROSS, which either tackle selected EBM challenges from a theoretical point of view or apply EBM in one of the selected case studies across Europe. In this article, we introduce relevant topics, address the most important lessons learnt, and suggest where research should go with aquatic EBM. We hope that this special issue will foster and facilitate the uptake of EBM in aquatic ecosystems and, therewith, provide the on-ground applications needed for evaluating EBM's utility to safeguard aquatic biodiversity.