The Legal Frame of Water Use
Water, as a natural resource, is an object of regulation by the environmental protection law, and the right to use water is shaped by three instruments of that law: the basic principles, the environmental-load norms and the environmental decision. This page describes precisely those three instruments — why water use is paid, how the quota system limits it, and when an environmental decision is required for an activity.
Basic Principles — Paid Nature Use
In planning and carrying out activities, state organs and all physical and legal persons are obliged to be guided by the basic principles of environmental protection, and for water three of them work with particular force. The principle of paid nature use: for an activity subject, the use of land, water, forest, flora and fauna, subsoil and subsoil natural resources is paid — water is public property and its use is not free. The polluter-pays principle: the activity subject is obliged to compensate the damage inflicted by it on the environment — water pollution demands compensation. And the sustainability principle: the use of the environment and natural resources is admissible where it does not endanger the development of society and the protection of the resources from irreversible changes is secured.
To these are added the risk-reduction principle — in planning, measures must be taken to prevent harmful impact; the restitution principle — a degraded environment must be restored in a form maximally close to its original state; and the impact-assessment principle — in designing, the subject must assess the possible impact of the activity. These principles are not abstract declarations: they are the foundation of the concrete instruments by which the state controls water.
Environmental-Load Norms and Quotas
In using and developing natural ecosystems, landscapes and other territories, maximum admissible load norms are established. These norms embrace quotas for the use of natural resources, established at the state level with regard to the principles of sustainable development; quotas for individual types of resources are established at regional and local levels. The norms are elaborated and approved by the ministry once every 5 years, by statute. For water this means that the volume that may be abstracted from a given water object, or discharged into it, is not unlimited — it is bounded and shaped by levels.