Special Issue: Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems

Abstract

The 5th Dubrovnik Conference on Sustainable Development of Energy, Water and Environment Systems (held in 2009) was attended by 307 scientists from 55 countries and 6 continents. The majority of the participants focused on methods, policies and technologies for increasing the sustainability of development, while always considering the economic, environmental and social aspects involved. With special reference to water science, the presented articles considered the link of both pillars of the conference (i.e. water and energy) all under the prism of environmental sustainability. The selected papers mainly discuss state-of-the-art water resources management issues which refer to applied international approaches and policies. Among others, they discuss water resources management issues in the framework of the European Water Framework Directive (WFD) 2000/60/EC, advanced technologies in the field of wastewater treatment (WWT) as well as engineering water works for water storage techniques and methodologies. Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC is considered as one of the most important legislative enactments -within the context of European environmental law and policywith respect to the management and protection of water resources within the European region. Bilaletdin et al., use steady state and dynamic modeling approach in order to assess the impacts of different loading scenarios of water quality of Lake Onega, the second largest lake in Europe, as demanded by the WFD. Martinez et al., assuming that the physical laws are called to be the objective and universal tools to assess water costs, developed Physical Hydronomics (PH) as the accounting tool for the WFD application, regarding its physicochemical objectives. Water Resour Manage (2011) 25:2917–2918 DOI 10.1007/s11269-011-9888-9