River Basin Water Quality Management Strategies in the Central European Region: An Example of the Nitra River (Slovakia)

Water quality management in most Western countries is based on the effluent quality standards, leading to uniform emission reductions at all sites. The development of such a policy is a simple task, and both the ambient water quality and the costs directly follow from these standards. Enforcement is also straightforward. This system is widely known as “end-of-pipe control”. In fact, the actual impacts and costs are often of little interest or unknown in advance. It is generally assumed that receiving water quality will be “good” if stringent effluent criteria were selected and money was available to realize the strategy (i.e., society is willing to pay for a safe environment). The choice of technology is also a side-effect of this system since standard values are most frequently set on the basis of a few (or one) well proven technologies (e.g., secondary activated sludge biological treatment in the U.S.).