This volume features the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop "Wastewater Reuse - Risk Assessment, Decision-Making and Environmental Security", held in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2006. It contains 45 papers that cover the current situation of water management in the world and especially the Middle-east and Mediterranean regions, addressing some of the most difficult international conflicts.

World water resources seem to be abundant; however, only 0.7% of this total amount is usable water. And owing to their nonuniform distribution, some countries have abundant water resources, whereas some others suffer from inadequate water, and even face severe water scarcity problems. Moreover, serious water pollution problems make 1/5 of the world’s population (approximately 1.1 billion people) under the risk of water-related diseases. In order to give a guideline to maintain the required quality of water according to the intended use, a group of international experts have come together to write this book. Authors target to pass recent available knowledge and information to the readers, who will vary from academicians, professional engineers and scientists, to undergraduate and graduate engineering students concerned with water quality problems all over the world. This book covers the main fields of Wastewater Treatment with 12 chapters, and uses knowledges in economic, information technologies, biology, etc. to make comprehensive analyses and applications.

Decision-making tools are needed to support environmental management in an increasingly global economy. Addressing threats and identifying actions to mitigate those threats necessitates an understanding of the basic risk assessment paradigm and the tools of risk analysis to assess, interpret, and communicate risks. It also requires modification of the risk paradigm itself to incorporate a complex array of quantitative and qualitative information that shapes the unique political and ecological challenges of different countries and regions around the world. This book builds a foundation to characterize and assess a broad range of human and ecological stressors, and risk management approaches to address those stressors, using chemical risk assessment methods and multi-criteria decision analysis tools. Chapters discuss the current state-of-knowledge with regard to emerging stressors and risk management, focusing on the adequacy of available systematic, quantitative tools to guide vulnerability and threat assessments, evaluate the consequences of different events and responses, and support decision-making. This book opens a dialogue on aspects of risk assessment and decision analysis that apply to real-time (immediate) and deliberative (long-term) risk management processes.

This volume discusses the current challenges related to the reuse of wastewater. It reviews the analytical methodologies for evaluating emerging contaminants and their transformation products, the sensitivity of various bioassays for assessing the biological effects of treated wastewater, and the bioavailability and uptake of organic contaminants during crop irrigation. It describes in detail the physicochemical and microbiological alterations in soil resulting from irrigation with treated urban wastewater, and discusses our current understanding of antibiotic resistance in wastewater treatment plants and in downstream environments. The book also includes an analysis of the effect of wastewater entering drinking water sources and production, and provides updated information on wastewater reuse for irrigation in North Africa. It presents an important integration tool for water recovery, known as water pinch analysis, and finally showcases two other examples of reuse – one in the paper industry and one in landfill management. It is of interest to experts from various fields of research, including analytical and environmental chemistry, toxicology and environmental and sanitary engineering.

Water scarcity and the need for ecological sustainability have led to the introduction of treated waste water as an additional water resource in the national water resource management plans of Mediterranean countries. Summarizing the results generated within the European Union-funded project INNOVA-MED, this volume highlights the following topics: Application of innovative technologies and practices for waste water treatment and reuse adapted to the Mediterranean region Constraints on the application of advanced treatments and reuse of reclaimed water and sludge Problems and requirements of sustainable water management in the Mediterranean area The book includes several examples of Mediterranean countries, such as Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Palestine and Spain, and presents their practical experiences in the application of innovative processes and practices for waste water treatment and reuse.

The concept of “environmental security” has emerged as one basis for understanding international conflicts. This phrase can mean a variety of things. It can signify security issues stemming from environmental concerns or conflicting needs, or it can mean that the environment is treated as a resource for the long term, and the question is what should be done today to preserve the quality of the environment in the future. In the same way that energy security is about ensuring access to energy for the long run, it can also mean that pressing environmental concerns create a situation where different countries and communities are forced to collaboratively design a unified response, even if cooperation is not generally in the logic of their relations. Over the last several years, the authors of this book and their colleagues have tried to demonstrate the power of risk assessment and decision analysis as valuable tools that decision makers should use for a broad range of environmental problems, including environmental security. Risk analysis is almost more a state of mind or a way of looking at problems than it is a kind of algorithm or a set of recipes. It projects a kind of rationality on problems and forces a certain degree of quantitative rigor, as opposed to the all too common tendency of making environmental recommendations based on anecdotal evidence.

Intensified agrarian and industrial activity has led to earth's soil and groundwater resources becoming polluted with hazardous materials. Bioremediation delivers a green technology using dynamics of living organisms, typically bacteria, fungi, microalgae and also plants to eliminate contaminants from ecosystem. This biological know-how is not only cost-effective compared to conventional physico-chemical approaches, but also very successful and is being employed in the field. This book focuses on important issues for several critical and common environmental pollutants, resulting in a compilation having recent updates on the bioremediation applications towards green and clean environment. This volume also describes updates on various novel approaches of bioremediation including nanotechnology, rhizomicrobiome technology, composting, metagenomics, and biosurfactants-based bioremediation. This volume is a resource for researchers, environmentalists, professionals and policy makers.