Working Group: MAR Regulations

Leader

Manuel Sapiano (Malta Energy and Water Agency) email: manuel.sapiano@gov.mt

Objective

to assemble access to known policies, regulations and guidelines on the IAH-MAR web site, together with any commentaries on these, and subsequently produce a critical review that would be useful for jurisdictions needing to develop such policies;

Intended Outputs

The program of the working group is proposed as two initial stages with possible extension :

Stage 1: Oct-Dec 2017 Collect from all who can contribute, existing policies, regulations and guidelines concerning water quality aspects of MAR and collate as a reference library on this web site. This will focus on protection of human health and the environment.

Stage 1: Library of water quality policies, regulations and guidelines for MAR

Stage 2: 2018 Working group to develop a critical review of these as a paper for ISMAR10 and web mounting that would be helpful for countries and states that have not yet formed or wish to update policies.

Manuel has made a contribution to the governance part of the 60 year history of MAR paper
He is preparing a paper for ISMAR10 to list and compare existing state and national water quality guidelines and regulations for MAR. He invited anyone who was aware of such a guideline in their country to send him the web link or a copy to add to those on the web site: https://recharge.iah.org/mar-regulations

Stage 3?: 2019: Based on experience in the above, the working group to determine whether to follow a similar approach for water allocation and natural resources management policies involving MAR.

How to contribute

Volunteers are needed to furnish web links for national and state policies, regulations and guidelines for MAR. Please send these to Peter Dillon at pdillon500@gmail.com and Manuel Sapiano at manuel.sapiano@gov.mt

History of Working Group and Outputs

At 44th IAH Congress, Dubrovnik 25 Sept 2017 at a Plenary of the IAH-MAR Commission, Todd Halihan (Oklahoma State Uni) asked if there were documented regulations and policies or approval processes for MAR projects. Those assembled thought it would be useful to to assemble examples from around the world and make them accessible via our web site and it would be possible with a working group to give some critical review of the assembled material. A small working group formed including , Manuel Sapiano (who has recently led such a review for European Commission), Peter Dillon, Russell Martin, Tim Parker, Paul Pavelic and Todd Halihan.

We would start by focussing on water quality – health and environmental issues Subject to the success of this and interest of members, we could then go on to look at water allocation policies associated with MAR. ACTION: This working group aims to assemble materials on IAH-MAR web site within 2 months, and subsequently undertake a critical review.

Members at Oct 2017: Manuel Sapiano (Malta), Todd Halihan, Tim Parker (USA), Paul Pavelic (Laos), Russell Martin, Andrew Ross, Peter Dillon (Australia), Jie (Jack) Yuan (Canada)