Surface Water Quality in Kosova

Global concern for environment is connected to the role it has for existence of the human civilization. Today in whole world more and more is talked about ecological crisis, in spite of fact that efforts were done and are being done to overcome it. Permanent monitoring of polluted waters with pollutants now and in the future is going to be a big challenge for civilization entire world. Water is a natural resource with general interest, which should be rationally used, and it must be protected from eventual degradation.

Application of several physical-chemical methods for detection of pollutants nature needs a technology with high expenses and high efforts in work. It plays an important role both in development of vital processes and industry. There is no branch of an industry that does not use the water.

Water resources in Kosovo are limited. The major ingredients of surface water are rivers excepting of some artificial accumulation lakes. In Kosovo’s territory is formed around of 3.6 milliards m3 of surface water per year or 114.5m3/s. This entire water amount through four catchments areas flows into three seas, as follows:

The Drini i Bardhë River Basin which flow in to the Adriatic Sea, the Ibër and the Morava e Binçës River Basin flow into the Black Sea and River Basin of the Lepenc which flow into the Aegean Sea. In general the main rivers are relatively small in our country and mostly spring in the mountain. Except for the Ibër River which springs outside of Kosovo, the all other watercourses are inside of country territory. Most of these rivers are renewed by the natural rainfall and water amount depends on them as well.

Because of morphological characteristic of our country, the overwhelming majority of urban and industrial users are located in middle and down part of the rivers flow. In the same time large urban centers are the main industrial centers too, and are located alongside the flow of the rivers. Besides pollution caused by natural way the surface water are polluted from urban and industrial wastewater discharge too. This is a serious problem because the wastewaters from the urban and industrial areas are directly discharged in the nearest rivers with no preliminary treatment which flows have a high variation during the four seasons. In this way the amount of wastewater discharged exceed the auto purification capacity of the river’s bed. Thus, the vulnerability of water quality is followed by serious changes of its properties, resulting undesirable effects, like: lack of oxygen, reduction in pH value, increase of heavy metal complexion capacity, increase of toxicity and hazardous substances accumulated in the food chain, eutrophication of water etc.

A considerable amount of Kosovo’s surface water is exposed in high level of pollution that actually can not be use for drinking water supply, irrigation and recreation purposes etc. In our country we have to be focused on finding practical solution of this issue, which should be preceded by a deep study that is intensively done in most of the countries dealing with this issue.