Drinking water interests in Denmark

Areas of special drinking water interest (OSD) are assigned the highest priority for drinking water supply. They are delineated according to criteria including future water demand, groundwater quality, natural protection, and the preservation of existing abstraction infrastructure. The spatial extent of OSD areas may be adjusted as new knowledge becomes available through fee-financed groundwater mapping under the Environmental Objectives Act § 8a. Within these areas and abstraction catchments for public waterworks, action plans are developed under Chapter 3 of the Water Supply Act. Areas of drinking water interest (OD) represent regions with groundwater of suitable quality for drinking water, primarily relevant for smaller utilities and local abstraction. The data are provided as a vector Dataset and are accessible via OGC web services. Source data are obtained from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency’s groundwater delineations (as of November 2022) and reflect the state of knowledge at publication time.