Groundwater Law, Abstraction, and Responding to Climate Change – assessing recent law reforms in British Columbia, Canada and England

In 2014, British Columbia enacted the Water Sustainability Act, a comprehensive overhaul of its groundwater and surface water regimes. Meanwhile, in England more piecemeal changes have been made to groundwater laws and policies. Through developing a framework from groundwater governance and climate change adaptation literature this article analyzes the effectiveness of these reforms, which have been carried out through different methods and from different starting points. The article goes on to consider how new processes and technologies, such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking), bring fresh challenges in aligning progress in groundwater law reforms with the wider policy framework