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Maintaining the environmental flows that provide freshwater ecosystem services is an essential element in preserving the biodiversity and ensuring resilience to uncertain futures and system shocks. The term environmental flows emerged to emphasise that a share of the water moving through an environment should be allocated to natures requirements if the goal of integrated water resource management is to be realized (Bernhardt et al. 2006). Such requirements are central to the Water Framework Directive (WFD) goal of Good Ecological Status, despite not explicitly using the term (EC 2000). A key issue however in actually achieving such ecologically acceptable flows depends on how they are defined and implemented. Incorporating elements of natural variability and resilience provides a more realistic and perhaps achievable way of assessing how vulnerable freshwater ecosystems are and what would be the most appropriate improvement interventions.