INFORMATION SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT FOR WATER QUALITY SUSTAINABLE MANAGEMENT

VOLODIMYR LOZANSKY

USRIEP
6, Bakulin Str., 310166 Kharkiv, UKRAINE

Existing knowledge of the water quality in surface water of Ukraine evidences that during several last decades it has continued to be unsatisfactory. The methodology of water quality management adopted here was directed at compliance with water quality norms (maximum allowable concentrations) set for protection of fish in all rivers, streams and lakes, practically without exception. There are 1113 such ambient water quality norms monitoring of which in 64 000 rivers of Ukraine never was done and practically is impossible.

Chemical composition of surface waters is monitored here on 112 rivers, 15 impounded reservoirs and 7 lakes. In addition, monitoring of ecological state of surface waters is carried out on 40 rivers and 7 impounding reservoirs.

The results of monitoring of restricted number of pollutants indicate that in many cases the actual concentration values are going over a preset norms from 2-3 to 70-90 times. It mainly relates to heavy metals, oil and nitrogen compounds.

And these results are not taking into consideration the summing up properties of 136 substances that must be done in accordance with the enacted rules on protection of fishery waters. These rules require summation of relative concentrations in accordance with the equation:

where i - the quantity of substances which require summation; C_i - actual concentration of substance in water; C_imp - maximum permissible concentration for this substance.

If the value of this sum is higher than 1, it is necessary to set a local actual permissible concentration the value of which must be considerably less than the value of C_imp.

In practice, these requirements were never accomplished and attempts to meet them for all surface waters are now more and more often considered as unrealizable. But it is known that putting unrealistic objectives is equal to their whole absence. That is why in Ukraine for the last several years the efforts have been concentrated on development of a new water protection strategy.

An overall and balanced management of water resources requires an appropriate water quality assessment and control within the river basin boundaries.

Such assessment must be based on a number of ecological and water usage criteria which may let to control water quality with the goal to achieve good surface water state and to comply with all standards and objectives to areas requiring special protection.

One of the activities in this field is development of a new approach to the ecological water quality assessment and standardization aimed at step by step improvement of surface water state in the most polluted rivers. Among results of this work it is expected to elaborate the methodology for environmental quality objectives and standards setting and its implementation in a pilot project. This may be done with the help of information system which will collect, handle, analyze and retrieve relevant data and transfer them in the form based on the modern network and GIS technologies to users responsible for water management, as well as to international nets and organizations.

Emanating from these pre-requisites, the author of this paper has proposed two projects. One of them has a title "Ecological water quality norms and categories determination for the most polluted parts of the main river basins of Ukraine and development of practical measures for their pollution abatement" The title of the second project is "Development of automated system for setting of environmental quality objectives and standards for rivers (ASSEQOS).

The first project is financed by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Ukraine. It is a pilot project which must be fulfilled during 1997-98. As a researches’ fund in Ukraine is rather limited, a sum of money set aside for this project in 1997 was only 34 000 Hrivnyas (about $ 17 000) and financing for 1998 has not been decided yet, but it cannot be more than 64 000 Hrivnyas (about $ 32 000). It may cover only part of expenses for the personnel salaries. As for the equipment (including computers and software) - it was necessary to find some support from international organizations.

With this aim in December 1997, there was prepared a proposal on the second project for NATO Science for Peace Programme which is now being considered by the NATO Scientific Affairs Division in Brussels. The proposal envisages total support in the sum of 8,000,000 BEF. This sum will be broken down as follows: equipment - 4,000,000 BEF; training and travel expenses - 3,500,000 BEF; project specific consumables - 500,000 BEF. The proposed NATO Country Partner is Environmental Resources Management Company (London).

In case of receiving this support, it would be possible to expand the scope of the first project and, during the three-year period of project implementation, to cover 200 largest river basins in Ukraine, provided that there would be possible to get some additional financing mainly for salaries of the Ukrainian personnel. These two projects may be combined and expanded under the title "Information System Development for Sustainable Water Quality Management".

The results of the first project will consist in development and experimental verification of the methodology for ecological assessment of water quality and standardization.

Implementation of the second project will serve as the important step towards provision of necessary equipment for development of the information system as well as adequate staff training. Combining of these two projects into a single one will lead to full implementation of the proposed ASSEQOSR on the whole country scale.

This system will create an integrated management mechanism for river basin authorities. Further development of the system with the aim of increasing the quantity of river basins that are managed with its help will be possible on the basis of the national contribution in cash and in kind.

The useful experience gained in the process of the system development may be transferred to other interested countries.

In the framework of activities connected with the National Dniepro Programme implementation, it is envisaged to create the basin information system to support water management. This project is financed by IDRC (Canada) and, as may be supposed, may provide all necessary equipment for these oblasts (regions) of Ukraine which belong to the Dniepro river basin.

Except the Dniepro river basin which is the largest in Ukraine, there is a number of other river basins which are not included into this Dniepro project. Now is under preparation a proposal on organization of River Basin Authorities for six largest river basin districts:

The Lower Dniester and Danube;

The Southern Bug;

The Upper Dniester and the Carpathian rivers;

The Western Bug;

The Siversky Donets and smaller rivers of the Azov Sea basin;

The Crimean rivers.

 

All these River Basin Authorities will need the information system support for water quality management with the use of ecological norms. This task may be solved in the framework of the proposed combined project. Of course, it will be necessary to ensure compatibility of both software and hardware of these two systems dealing with the Dniepro river basin and six other basins. The Computer Center for the Dniepro Basin will be presumably located in Kyiv. The second Computer Center for the six river basins may be located in the premises of USRIEP in Kharkiv.

Summing up all drafted above, it is possible to set forth the main features of the proposed combined project.

Project title: Development of the River Basin Information System for Sustainable Water

Quality Management

Project objective: In accordance with new Water Code of Ukraine, it is necessary to establish perspective environmental objectives and current water quality standards for all Ukrainian rivers. The project objective is to develop, validate and introduce new method and facilities for solving this problem with the help of a decision-making support system which would enable to set these environmental objectives and standards on the basis of new ecological water quality classification and modern techniques for information processing.

Project tasks. For achievement of this objective it is necessary:

to choose the parts of rivers which will be controlled on the basis of ecological norms setting and monitoring of compliance;

to adopt a methodology of water quality assessment and ecological norms setting;

to work out a procedure of information collection and processing;

to design the information system;

to assemble, adjust and put into operation the automated system;

to work out procedures of the automated system functioning;

to carry out test running and to start normal operation of the system.

It is estimated that fulfillment of this work may take three years.

From Ukrainian side, Ukrainian Scientific Research Institute of Ecological Problems (USRIEP, Kharkiv) and the Institute of Hydrobiology (Kyiv) may act as the key research organizations under the project. End-users of the project outputs will be the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Nuclear safety of Ukraine and its regional departments, and in the future, once have been established, the River Basin Authorities.

The USRIEP has positive experience in creation of a pilot automated system for water quality management within the 100 km section of the Siversky Donets river, which crosses the eastern part of Ukraine. A six-year period of operation of this system, starting from 1979, showed its high efficiency in the field of river water quality improvement.

It is expected that the positive effect of the proposed ASSEQOSR implementation will consist in initialization and maintenance of a steady process of step-by-step water quality improvement on the basis of ecological norms setting, water quality monitoring and effluent discharge control.

The financial needs for elaboration of this system exceed the existing capacity of Ukraine for research and development activities. So, it would be desirable to put together the international, national and local financial resources to reach the decontamination targets for the rivers of Ukraine