ABSTRACT
Although a few EIAs of desalination projects have recently become available, these reflect the state of knowledge from the predictive process, while results from the postdictive process are only now beginning to be investigated. The longest monitoring programme, of which results have been regularly published, only looks back on two years of operational monitoring [176]. In 2008, the U.S. National Research Council attested a “surprising paucity of useful experimental data, either from laboratory tests or from field monitoring”. Among the long-term research needs identified were site-specific assessments of the impacts of source water withdrawals and concentrate management, and the development of monitoring and assessment protocols for evaluating the potential ecological impacts of concentrate discharge [5]. In other words, still missing are the results from systematic monitoring studies and methodological frameworks for conducting these studies. The core of the problem is to design a monitoring programme that can adequately distinguish the effects of the desalination project from natural processes.
