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We present the book Challenges of Water Economics in Spain: Water Costs and Accounts* by José Manuel Naredo. This book introduces an eco-integrative methodology aimed at overcoming the 25-year deadlock in the economic implementation of the Water Framework Directive.

The author's work offers highly enlightening proposals to address long-standing uncertainties regarding the economic treatment of water, adopting approaches that help overcome the traditional divide between economics and ecology.

Industrialization, overexploitation, and pollution have turned freshwater into a scarce resource. At the Dublin Conference (1992), water was declared an “economic good” in a strictly monetary sense, overlooking many of the values associated with water. The legal framework classifies water-related costs into three categories: financial costs, environmental costs, and resource costs. It also establishes the principle of cost recovery based on the “polluter pays” principle.

In the author's own words:

We emphasize that the present methodological proposal does not seek to replace old reductionisms with new ones. Rather, it aims to open up the closed—generally one-dimensional—frameworks of reasoning that have dominated the field, paving the way for multidimensional and transdisciplinary approaches better suited to addressing the cross-cutting challenges of water management in contemporary industrial societies. The objective is not to eliminate or marginalize traditional monetary and hydraulic approaches, but to reposition them within the broader framework of these new perspectives.

 

This book forms part of the outputs derived from the research project “Just Water Transition for Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Change Adaptation: Towards a Roadmap”, which has been funded by the Spanish Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge. However, the contents of this publication do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the Ministry.