Risk Management as a Tool to Protect Water resources

Paper i proceeding, 2010

ABSTRACT: Water pollution is a global problem, and could have negative impacts on ecosystems, food production, health, and economic activities. The pollutants may have severe impacts on the usefulness and value of water resources. Presence of hazardous substances, poor monitoring and control, improper handling and treatment of wastes as well as misuse of water could be considered as the main causes for pollution of water resources. Furthermore, climate change, increasing of human population and the unprecedented urbanization and industrialization of the developing countries will make the situation worse in terms of pollution and consequently shortage of freshwater resources. Indeed water shortage is very often induced by water pollution. One of the biggest challenges in 21st century will be access to freshwater. Note that more than one billion people still have no access to clean drinking water, while approximately two and a half billion do not have adequate sanitation services. Due to the abovementioned problem a global attempts is needed to be put to protect and save the water resources. Now the question is: What shall we do to protect or save the water sources? In order to protect the water resources the following questions should be answered: • What are the hazardous substances/contaminants as the causes of pollution? • What are acceptable rate of the contaminants? • Where the pollution substances are generated? • How hazardous substances could reach the water resources? • How the pollution could be prevented or how the effects of hazardous substances could be minimized to the acceptable level? A model has been developed by which the risk of water polluters could be identified and minimized. A case has been selected to see how the model works. It was found that the model accompanied by cause effect analysis procedure and weighting risk factors is capable of ranking the existing risks regarding the contaminated wastes in an area. Furthermore it was found that reducing risk levels could be achieved as the model considers the most important problems related to the environment.