Water quality standards for the protection of human health and aquatic ecosystems in Korea: current state and future perspective

Since the Korean Ministry of the Environment established the Master Plan for Water Environment (2006–2015), the need to revise the water quality standards (WQSs) has driven government projects to expand the standards for the protection of human health and aquatic ecosystems. This study aimed to provide an historical overview of how these WQSs were established, amended, and expanded over the past 10 years in Korea. Here, major projects related to national monitoring in rivers and the amendment of WQSs were intensely reviewed, including projects on the categorization of hazardous chemicals potentially discharged into surface water, the chemical ranking and scoring methodology for surface water (CRAFT, Chemical RAnking of surFace water polluTants), whole effluent toxicity (WET) management systems, the 4th, 5th, and 6th revisions of the water quality standards for the protection of human health, and efforts toward developing the 7th revision. In this review, we assimilated the past and current status as well as future perspectives of Korean surface WQSs. This research provides information that aids our understanding of how surface WQSs have been expanded, and how scientific approaches to ensure water quality have been applied at each step of the process in Korea.