Vattenskyddsområden - ett lokalt ansvar med ett centralt syfte

Sammanfattning: Clean water is an essentiality from both an individual and societal perspective. Legal actions enable the enforcement of the protection that the drinking water resource needs to protect the current but also the future supply of clean and sustainable water. Establishing water protection areas (WPA) is today the legal action that Swedish municipalities or county administration boards have at their disposal to carry out the work of securing quantitative and qualitative parameters for the raw water, which is then delivered to the drinking water network. In this literature study, 26 technical documents with proposals for WPA, between 2010 and 2021, have been examined with the ambition of mapping any knowledge gaps in the documents. The investigation is based on identifying, if possible, whether the municipalities, VA-organizations and their consultants give rise to qualitative differences in the investigation of an application for a WPA. It turned out to be large qualitative differences related to hydrogeological knowledge, risk assessment and work methodology. Large parts of the material were also classified and therefore difficult to compare. Through this observation, it becomes very complex to compare the different municipalities, VA companies and consultants, which thus means that no clear conclusions can be drawn. Despite the lack of clear conclusion, weak tendencies shows that the quality of the technical basis seems to correlate with the water withdrawal, consequently a larger water withdrawal seems to result to a higher technical quality. The study emphasizes the importance that the responsibility should be lifted from local responsibility, municipality and county administration board, to the national level with greater expertise to enable safer establishment of WSA to protect Sweden's current and future water resources. Water resources should furthermore be secured through more legal protections, e.g. that they should be able to be declared national interests.