Thames 21 and Beyond: Towards Sustainable Management for Our Water Environment

Initiatives taken in Thames Region over the last two decades have led the way towards achieving a sustainable water environment in the United Kingdom (UK). Single-function design, presented as a fait accompli to the public, progressed to environmentally sensitive river management, then to floodplain and catchment/watershed management, in just five years of concentrated effort, much of which has been documented. This paper describes the key points from this experience, which serve as background for the current initiatives. These have increasingly emphasised the prevention of further problems through influencing land use decision-making processes, rather than continuing to spend many times more resources on trying to mitigate the effects of poor decisions, after their implementation. At the same time, there has been a strong European emphasis on river restoration; brief examples are given of river rehabilitation programmes in the UK, Denmark and Germany.