The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) constitutes a milestone for the protection of aquatic ecosystems. With respect to the challenging objectives of the WFD and the connected financial burdens, which may possibly exceed the capabilities of some regions, it is essential to establish a targeted and integrated view of the economic aspects, which are applicable within the implementation process of the WFD. This is necessary to provide for a sustainable and acceptable implementation of the WFD with regard to the affected parties. However up to now there are many undefined legal concepts and few specific procedural developments, which often do not correspond to the required interdisciplinary and practical approach but are based on complex scientific methods. Hence the purpose of the present article should consist in providing an approach for the integration of the different economic aspects of the WFD in the establishment of the programme of measures and for the concretisation of the river basin specific environmental objectives to be reached.
For the examination of the effects of different storm water management strategies in an urban catchment area on receiving water quality, an integrated simulation of the sewer system, wastewater treatment plant and receiving water is carried out. In the sewer system real-time control measures are implemented. As examples of source control measures the reduction of wastewater and the reduction of the amount of impervious surfaces producing storm water discharges are examined. The surface runoff calculation and the simulation of the sewer system and the WWTP are based on a MATLAB®/SIMULINK® simulation environment. The impact of the measures on the receiving water is simulated using AQUASIM. It can be shown that the examined storm water management measures, especially the source control measures, can reduce the combined sewer overflow volume and the pollutant discharge load considerably. All examined measures also have positive effects on the receiving water quality. Moreover, the reduction of impervious surfaces avoids combined sewer overflow activities, and in consequence prevents pollutants from discharging into the receiving water after small rainfall events. However, the receiving water quality improvement may not be seen as important enough to avoid acute receiving water effects in general.
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