The Turkish Journal Of Occupational / Environmental Medicine and Safety

Abstract

The
management and planning of water resources recently become important and
increasingly complex. While the most of the developed countries managed their
water source with sustainable plans to water production, our country has newly
started the work within its watershed management principles. Due to excessive
population growth the environmental problems blow out after industrialization,
land degradation, wrong agricultural and forestry applications. These
misapplications negatively affect water resources. Drinking water resources are
divided into surface water and groundwater. The water needs of settlements are
mostly covered by surface water resources. For water supply generally a dam is
built into the most suitable lower part of the river. However, the basins
contain not only forests and meadows, but also settlements, livestock and
agricultural activities. The required quality and quantity of drinking water
production have become very difficult and expensive due to this reason. Integrated
watershed management aims to protect water resources and improve the quality of
drinking water with a systematic and comprehensive approach to addressing all
these problems. European countries enforced a water framework directive in 2000
in order to produce and protect water resources according to common standards.
This provided continuous monitoring of physicochemical, chemical, biological
and hydro-morphological quality of water as measured by the Water Framework
Directive.

This
study illustrates the sustainability of renewable water source and to plan for
sustainable water production with considering climate, geology, topography,
soil, vegetation cover, land use types and socio-economic elements and
relations between them by the determined management principles.