통합적 환경관리를 위한 연안수질관리체제 개선방안

Abstract

Improvement of Water Quality Management Systems to Support Integrated Coastal Environment Management Coastal areas have unique ecological and socioeconomic values as a transitional environment where land and sea meet. Despite of overall improvement of coastal water qualities in recent years, waters in semi-enclosed coastal bays or near populated cities and large estuaries such as Shiwha Lake, Gwangyang Bay, Masan Bay and coasts of Busan and Incheon are still not good enough to support the sustainable use of coastal resources. This reflects that current coastal water quality management systems have some institutional and operational limitations to effectively control the water pollution sources, particularly the land-based pollution sources. Review on the coastal water quality management systems in this study addressed several issues as the following: ● Concentration-based national effluent limit for the control of individual point pollution sources could not be a safeguard at local levels where carrying capacities of the waters were very limited, e.g. semi-enclosed Masan and Gwangyang Bays. ● Top priority of the national water quality policy was always placed on securing safe and clean drinking water supply so that investment and institutional support for improving coastal water qualities were relatively insufficient. ● Shared jurisdiction (Ministry of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries - Ministry of Environment) and fragmented systems on coastal environment management without proper co-ordinating mechanisms resulted in some conflicts, discrepancies, or duplications among the responsible authorities or related laws and regulations. ● Management efforts based on physico-chemical indicators (mainly chemical oxygen demand, COD) were not enough to support resource-based coastal environment management, which aims to overall environmental quality improvement including coastal ecosystems and biological resources. Recommended actions and approaches to effectively deal with those issues include the following: ● Introduction of total-load-based pollution control system is necessary to overcome the inherited limitations of the current concentration-based pollution control system. It might be considered development and application of more tighten local or regional effluent limits for degraded coastal waters, development of point-source discharge permit system as the 'National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System' in the United States, and extended application of 'Total Pollution Load Management System' which is only being forced in major river basins in Korea. ● Enhancement of coordinating mechanisms and rearrangement of institutional frameworks are required to promote the cooperation among stakeholder and to support the integrated and harmonized coastal environment management in all sectors and levels. These include establishing maritime affairs division in 'Presidential Commission on Sustainable Development' to lead sustainable coastal development, enhancing the capability of 'Commission on Protection of the Quality and Supply of Freshwater Resources' to promote coordination among central government agencies, and restructuring institutional frameworks to effectively support integrated coastal management. ● It is necessary to reenforce pre-existing 'Coastal Environment Management Zone(CEMZ)' program as well as to develop new watershed-based coastal management programs such as "Estuary Environment Management Program(EEMP)'. Local programs should be established to draw active participations and involvements of stakeholder for the successful planning and implementing CEMZ action plan. Introduction of EEMP will be very helpful to improve and protect the degraded nation's estuarine environments so that development of institutional or noninstitutional EEMP is strongly recommended. To effectively backup these kinds of watershed-based management programs, watershed management frameworks applicable to national, regional, and local levels and their implementation strategies should be developed as soon as possible.