Enhancing Drinking Water Quality

Watershed interventions can also be designed to manage sediment to enhance the quality of municipal and urban water supply schemes. Investments in green infrastructure using natural systems to trap sediment and regulate water often provide a more cost-effective approach than relying solely on grey infrastructure such as reservoirs and treatment systems. Designing such projects are based on the principle that it is cheaper to prevent water problems at the source than to address it further downstream. One of the world’s most famous examples of this is the Water Supply of New York that funds a watershed protection Programme in the Catskill mountains for USD 1.5 Billion annually, but this saved over USD 10 Billion, the cost of a massive filtration plant and its operation whilst contributing to multiple environmental co-benefits.