7.4.   The Watercourse Act and the Ochre Act



The first Danish Watercourse Act is from 1880. This was a time when the Danish agricultural sector really started to drain farmland. The most important consideration was the right to drain water away from farmland. In 1982, consideration for the environment was woven into a new Watercourse Act, an Act still in force today. A political attempt to introduce a new watercourse Act in 1989-91 failed, the main reason for this being that the Bill proposed to privatize many watercourses, i.e. to let the farmers pay for watercourse maintenance themselves.

Drainage right. The Ochre Act:

Every farmer has the right to drain his land such that the water level sinks sufficiently to allow the soil to be cultivated.

This was originally also the case in areas where the drainage water contains ochre. Ochre has a strongly negative impact on watercourse quality and on living conditions for fish. However, classic interpretation of the Environmental Protection Act led to the view that this was not "pollution" because it took place as a result of normal farming practice. The concept of pollution in the Environmental Protection Act does not include normal agricultural practice.

It was therefore decided to introduce special legislation on ochre. The Act requires that farmers who want to drain ochreous areas must have the permission of the County. Ochreous areas, which are found in parts of Jutland, are identified on a special map. The County can require that ochre treatment is established in conjunction with drainage, in which case a subsidy is given. If the County refuses permission for an area to be drained that has previously been drained, then compensation for depreciation in value has to be given.

Channelization, culverting and restoration:

Since 1880, 97% of the 30,000 km of natural watercourses in Denmark have been channelized or culverted. There are still rules on channelization, but permission is no longer normally given to channelize natural watercourses. On the other hand, a number of watercourse restoration projects are being undertaken. In some cases channelized watercourses are remeandered, in others culverted watercourses are exposed again. However, such projects can normally only be undertaken if compensation is awarded to the farmers affected by the projects, e.g. for the loss of cultivable land.

Maintenance. Provisional Orders:

Originally, farmers maintained the watercourses themselves. However, in the 1960s the Counties and Municipalities took over maintenance of large watercourses, the Counties being responsible for the largest of them (approx. 7,000 km) and the Municipalities for the medium-sized ones (approx. 13,000 km), while the farmers retained maintenance responsibility for the small watercourses.

Each public watercourse is governed by a detailed Provisional Order that stipulates when the weed is to be cleared and the minimum bed width, as well as other requirements to the watercourse’s form. If the public authorities do not comply with the Provisional Order, and flooding results, then a farmer whose crops are thereby damaged has a good chance of winning compensation17.

The Provisional Orders are currently being revised with a view to more environmentally sound maintenance, and revision is expected to have been completed by 1996.

Uncultivated border zones:

A 1992 Act introduced a legal requirement for farmers to leave uncultivated a 2 m buffer zone alongside all watercourses that are natural or have a high quality objective (fish water or better)18. In fact, most open watercourses, i.e. 30,000 km, are encompassed. The purpose of this requirement is to ensure maintenance of the watercourse, especially that the banks do not collapse.


MUncultivated 2 m wide buffer zones

The 2 m border zones are considered by farmers as an infringement of their ownership rights19. Approx. 30-50% of the affected farmers have refused to comply with the requirement.

Progress with respect to environmental regulation of watercourses: Clean water is the first requirement for a varied watercourse flora and fauna. That is not enough, however. There is not much life in a channel that is as straight as an arrow. The initiatives taken under the Watercourse Act, i.e. restoration and environmentally sound maintenance, have undoubtedly contributed to the improvement of watercourse flora and fauna. Environmentally sound maintenance has become widely accepted and is applied in most of the county watercourses and approx. 2/3 of municipal watercourses. The scale of restoration work and suchlike is still modest, however. Approximately 25 km of watercourse has been remeandered, and approx. 70 fauna passages have been established to allow fish and invertebrates to pass obstructions such as weirs, dams, culverts, etc. The cost of restoration projects averages around DKK 600,000 per km for remeandering channelized reaches and DKK 150,000 per km for exposing culverted reaches20. A major project to restore 20 km of the river Skjern Å, which is one of the largest watercourses in Denmark, is expected to be initiated in the near future.