An Integrated Management Approach for Water Quality and Quantity: Case Studies in North China

Abstract

This paper presents a systematic concept of integrated water resources quantity and quality assessment and develops a new approach to assess available water resources for water quality management. The method considers not only environmental flow demand in a river system but also water quality objectives as determined by water service function regionalization in the river. The method was applied in North China in basins with different conditions. The results show that this integrated assessment approach provides useful information for decision making concerning allocation of available water resources under the water quality and environmental flow constraints, indicating the need to reduce wastewater loads to reach specific water quality standards.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Key Water Project (2009ZX07210-006), National Basic Research Program of China (2010CB428406), and MWR project (Grant Number 200801001). I also very much appreciate the help and contributions to the case study by my colleagues and students, in particular Wang Z. G., Zhang Y. Y., Liu K. Y., and Wang M. L. My thanks also to C. Xu, L. Gottschalk, and I. Krasovskaia for their help in improving the present paper.