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The Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council 2000/60/EC: Establishing a Framework for Community Action in the Field of Water Policy, states that it is necessary to consider human activities within a river basin in order to prevent and reduce the spreading of pollutants and to achieve good water status. This paper shows a simple method to estimate the environmental pressure from the deicing of roads as steady state chloride concentration in water. The data processed are presented using GIS. The result showed that the contribution of deicing salt is of importance for the chloride concentration on a regional scale. The increase in chloride concentration is also compared to the background concentration and other sources of chloride within the river basin. Road salt applied by the Swedish National Road Administration (SNRA) accounts for more than half of the total chloride load for the river basin investigated. The method presented may easily be generalised to a national scale for monitoring the environmental effects of deicing salt application. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The past decades have witnessed some efforts in point source water pollution controls in China. However, adequate abatement efforts have not been implemented on non-point source control, and non-point source contributions remain and have increased as a share of surface water degradation. It has been noted that conventional command-and-control regulations are ineffective for agricultural non-point source pollution, and watershed abatement trading between point and non-point sources may serve as a cost-effective way to deal with it. In this paper, the feasibility of point-non-point sources effluent trading in China and cost-effectiveness of the trading system on water pollution control are evaluated using a stochastic programming model and a combined probabilistic watershed simulation of a representative agricultural watershed in the Taihu Lake area. The method and model can be used to assess economic and environmental opportunities of trading in similar watersheds in China. The use of explicit emission target and reliability decision rules in the chance-constrained programming model is a practical simplification to convert a stochastic program into a solvable deterministic problem. Based on the simulation, suggestions on development and implementation of point-non-point sources abatement trading scheme in China were discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]