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Introduction | Hydraulic efficiency | Water and Tourism | The cost and the sale price | Cost, price and the water invoice | Sustainable managment | Water quality

Water quality

A main indicator of a water management system is the quality of the water.

Water quality assures the water´s proper functioning as an economic, environmental and social resource so that it has the capacity to satisfy the environmental requirements.

The best way to evaluate this functionality is described by the National Water Managment Agency as "... water planning consists of guaranteeing its ecological quality."

The agency thinks that the river is a water factory the society and the economy, and therefore tries to assure its correct functioning. This factory works biologically purifying itself.

This ecological water quality depends on the climatic zone it is in, on its particular biophysical and geographical factors. The hydrological planning of every water basin must define the ecological qualities of every water mass to assure the sustainability of the resource.

The impacts of climatic change in the regime of rainfalls in Spain are not easy to identify given the complexity of the spatial distribution of the rains and their high variability. In the environment of the last five hundred years, the reconstruction of the climate shows the succession of rainy and dry periods, of changeable duration and without sharp changes, both in the south and in the north.

In the future the trend points to a minor accumulated annual rainfall, with a major reduction in rainfall. In spring and increases of rainfall in the West of the Peninsula in winter and in the North-East in autumn. These changes are expected to be more intense as the emission of greenhouse gases increases.

Introduction | Hydraulic efficiency | Water and Tourism | The cost and the sale price | Cost, price and the water invoice | Sustainable managment | Water quality