Then what about the present face of our waterfront area? The growing population since 1960 to 70, expanding urban areas, more agricultural areas needed, and as whole nationwide lands became the objects of industrialization, our mountains and rivers rapidly getting threatened by many indiscriminate human behaviors in the name of development. Moreover, the inflows of contaminants sharply increased from 1970 to 80 considerably pollute the rivers. Fortunately, since the government has steadily made deliberate endeavors to secure water resources and run projects of water quality improvement, the problem concerning to the flowing rivers have been resolved more or less, however, the upper area of the Nakdong River and the Yeongsan River still suffers from chronic water shortage problem or bad water quality for ordinary consumption. The more serious thing is riparian zones. Up until now, government has, actually, almost neglected the waterfront areas except to the sporadic measurement for flood like embankments. Rather than that, we had constructed the facilities having no valuable connection with the function related to the rivers so to eventually have hindered positively esthetic functions that waterfront might area give.
Concretely, present waterfront has been damaged from its original functions because of indiscriminate occupation by agricultural land, roads bounded by rivers, extinction of natural buffer zone by embankment construction, and unnecessary artificial facilities like roads, parking lot and playground.
At first, let us look into the matter of occupation by agricultural area. In case of the national river sector of the Nakdong River, the 58% out of whole the terrace land on the river has been converted to farmland or vinyl greenhouse zones. The 65% of the Geum River and 67% of Yeongsan River are wrongfully used under agricultural purpose. The problem is, by those wrongful agricultural activities on the riverside lands, that the waterfront area as a companion counterpart with aquatic ecosystem has been highly destructed.
Moreover, like these farming activities played in malignant part in water contamination by releasing agricultural chemicals without any censorship.
The second thing, by the extinction of forest zone which belonged to natural river area, the function of waterfront area as the buffer zone has weaved off. The forest zone is natural vegetation belt-type area which forms alongside the stream, also known as 'riparian buffer zone'. The forest zone plays the role of habitat and eco-corridor by itself, in further it functions of blocking and filtering contaminants. However, by constructing embankment as a part of riverside improvement project and eliminating deliberately the forest zone, we finally got to lose those natural buffer zones unfortunately. Farming activities within riverside also catalyzed the extinction of forest zones.
The third and final, one of the problems of our waterfront area's reality is the excessive vegetation on deposit soils of the sand bar or the terrace land on the river. You can find the reasons from the things that dam constructions had reduces the inundation disasters, and then this affected to vegetation's excessive proliferation on deposit soils. These are able to be observed easily and commonly in the areas of the Namhan River, the upper Nakdong River, the Yeongsan River's main stream, the middle Geum River and small streams connected from big dams. In isolation from the previously explained forest zones (riparian forest buffer zone along the riverside), those excessively grown heaps of vegetation could threaten the ecosystem and inundation control system. Problems like these are already spotted the upper Nakdong and lower area of Andong Imha Dam.
