Management of abandoned and contaminated land - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 183

habitat of the microbiota—having an essential role in element cycling, ensuring ecosys-
tem homeostasis and ecosystem services—is rarely the aim of civil group activists or
environmental protests. The role of soil microbiota in contaminated site management
is being increasingly recognized due to its applicability in contaminated site bioreme-
diation. Along this line the reputation of soil microorganisms began to occupy their
rightful place in those cases when human society may directly benefit from the microor-
ganisms' work. At industrial sites and brownfields, where future land use is also limited
to less sensitive levels, the complete rehabilitation of the sites, restoration of the original
or of good quality ecosystem services would not be economically feasible.
Present and future land uses might be rather different, mainly in those cases where
contaminated site management is part of the regional development plan or brownfield
redevelopment. The receptors of the potential adverse effects of contaminants and the
quantity of the risk highly depend on land uses. Risk and land use form an iterative pair
in the risk management scheme; the target of the risk reduction measure is defined by
future land use, but land use can also be adjusted to the rate of residual risk to find an
ecologically and economically based optimum during the management and planning.
The receptors of the risk of contaminated sites are also dependent on the legal back-
ground and the management concept. Very often only human receptors are considered,
but some countries, e.g., Hungary, consider groundwater as a priority receptor of soil
contamination, and thus groundwater protection is in the focus of both the regulatory
framework and the officially required management. Another simplification in this con-
cept is that groundwater is considered as drinking water, i.e., water for multifunctional
use (Figure 7.4). This concept ensures high-level protection for subsurface waters but
neglects all those contaminated sites, where groundwater is not directly endangered.
Figure 7.4 Environmental impacts of contaminated groundwater.