Currently, in many countries, such as Spain, Israel, Chile and Australia, the development of a rigorous environmental impact assessment process is required, both for the construction and operational phases. During its developent, the most important legal management tools are established within the local environmental regulation, to prevent and adopt mitigation measures that guarantee the sustainable development of desalination projects. This includes a series of administrative tools and periodic environmental monitoring, to adopt preventive, corrective and further monitoring measures of the state of the surrounding marine environment.
Under the context of this environmental assessment process, numerous countries require compliance with an Environmental Monitoring Program (PVA), in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the preventive and corrective measures established during the environmental assessment process, and thus guarantee the operation of desalination plants without producing significant environmental impacts. The PVAs establishes a series of mandatory requirements that are mainly related to the monitoring of discharge, using a series of measurements and characterizations based on physical-chemical and biological information. In addition, the PVAs could also include different requirements related to monitoring the effects of seawater intake and those that may potentially be related to effects on the terrestrial environment.