New elements of water management

Abstract

Modern water management goes presently through difficult processes of adaptation to new tatgets
stipulated by the needs of sustainable development. The process of change requires constant
widening of necessary knowledge and activitiy of engineers and scientists dealing with water
management. New targets require more itegrated actions, involving also new subject areas that are
only indirectly connected with traditional water management issues. To these belongs, for
example, management of raw materials, products and residuals, problems of soil pollution and
resulting chemical contamination of agricultural products, presence of contaminants in food,
influencing helth of population. Simultaneously, traditional goals of water management must be
also be fulfilled while costs of maintenance and renovation of oldering water supply and sanitary
systems increase parallel with age of constructions.
Sustainable develpment postulates require actions towards preservation and gradual improvement
of water quality in local and regional surface- and groundwater reservoirs in all regions,
protection of agricultural soils, forests and other ecological systems such as weltands, medows,
rivers and lakes that constitute a base for maintaining biological diversity and, simultaneously, for
food production and recreation of population in villages and cities. It may be notted that there is a
general trend to widen the role of scientists and engineers dealing with water management to
adress other, less typical areas, such as management of residuals, protection of rawmaterials and
health protection of population. New understanding is growing among scientists and population
that residuals, often classified as Agarbage=, Apollution:or Asolid weaste= may also constitute
new valuable resnources, it may be visualized by following symmetrical equation:
Pollution = lost resources = pollution
Beginning with consideration of pollution problems one will arrive to the problem oflost natural
resources. Starting with a problem of inefective use and lost natural resources, one will arrve to
the problem of environmental pollution.