A study on an integrated water quantity and water quality evaluation method for the implementation of integrated water resource management policies in the Republic of Korea

Abstract

The existing methods of river evaluation tend to focus exclusively on water quantity; therefore, they do not provide a suitable methodology for integrated water management. In this study, research was carried out to develop an integrated river evaluation system that can simultaneously consider water quantity and water quality to improve the existing river evaluation methods. To this end, specific indicators were established to evaluate water quantity and water quality; moreover, an integrated evaluation formula was developed to express each indicator as an index. The integrated evaluation formula used additive functions and enabled integrated and comprehensive river evaluation through the sum of each indicator's indices. The research subjects were rivers in the Paldang watershed, which surrounds important water resources in rep. of Korea. The rivers were analyzed using the study's integrated river evaluation formula to identify the deteriorated grade of the water quality as well as the water quantity. Finally, the results of the integrated river evaluation rating were found to be poor or very poor. Based on this, the study determined that an integrated river management policy is required to simultaneously consider water quantity and water quality to restore the integrity of the rivers in the Special Countermeasures Area. The existing evaluations of rivers, which had been conducted only with a focus on water quantity, could be judged narrow or incomplete results. Based on this finding, it was also possible to identify an urgent need for a basic river management plan that can consider both water quantity and water quality organically. Ultimately, the study demonstrated that its methodology was able to make highly intuitive judgments about rivers' current conditions; thus, it can be utilized to generate basic data for the establishment of customized river management policies.