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 du