Multi Criteria Framework for Surface Water Quality Management

Abstract

Edku Lake, the third largest in the system of the northern coastal wetlands in Egypt, situated on the west part of Nile Delta, is considered as an important fishing area in Egypt. The lake suffers from high levels of aquatic vegetation and from the expansion in fish farming and agricultural discharges. To solve lake water quality problems, the study aims to develop the multi-criteria analysis (MCA) framework capable of evaluating the proposed lake water quality improvement scenarios. The work tasks were divided into two phases. In the first phase, many proposed scenarios involved on primary, secondary, surface wetland, biological biofilm, and adding a new artificial inlet were proposed by applying Surface-water Modeling System (SMS) with two dimensional hydrodynamic. The second phase involved in developing the required hierarchical MCA based on an integrated technical, environmental, economic and socio-community indicators. The main results of MCA showed that the water quality management scenario focusing on combination of applying biological biofilm technique for drain effluents and also adding a new artificial inlet at the northern lake region can represent the optimum scenario for solving the lake water quality problems.