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Protecting Groundwater for Health
which fragmental local initiatives and actions can be amalgamated in to a comprehensive national or regional policy.
Figure 20.1. Flow chart for developing groundwater protection policies
20.1
GROUNDWATER PROTECTION POLICIES
Policies need to be applied in a properly understood and constituted framework so that their application is clear and their effectiveness is assured. OECD (1989) developed the DPSIR causality framework (shown in Figure 20.2) to enable the basic issues in policy development to be identified and possible impacts of proposed solutions to be tested. The DPSIR framework involves five principal steps. The Driving forces describe the human activities, such as the intensification of farming and chemical industry production or development of land for housing, which may lead to significant threats to the groundwater quality or quantity (as described in Section II ). The Pressures describe the stresses that the developments place on a particular aquifer in terms of its possible uses. The State of the aquifer is described in terms of its quality and hydraulic condition and the Impact shows the outcome of loss of the source, for example the need to find alternative drinking-water sources if an aquifer becomes unusable. Responses describe