urban water Articles
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Capacity attributes of future urban water management regimes: projections from Australian sustainability practitioners
Transitioning to more sustainable urban water management is widely accepted as an essential societal objective. While there has been significant progress in developing technical solutions to the challenges faced, numerous barriers remain at the regime level, indicating that further investigation into the regime is required. This paper reports on a social research project aimed at identifying ...
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Receptivity to sustainable urban water management in the South West Pacific
Small urban centres in the South West Pacific face many challenges regarding urban water management in the light of future uncertainties and climate change. Without implementing sustainable urban water management (SUWM), they risk adverse environmental and public health impacts, but little is known regarding the receptivity of urban water professionals towards its principles and practices. This ...
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Working towards sustainable urban water management: the vulnerability blind spot
The unprecedented water scarcity in Australia coincides with the adoption of a new urban water rhetoric. The ‘Security through Diversity’ strategy has been adopted in a number of Australian cities as a new and innovative approach to urban water management. Although this strategy offers a more holistic approach to urban water management, in practice, the Security through Diversity strategy is ...
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Realising sustainable urban water management: Can social theory help?
It has been acknowledged, in Australia and beyond, that existing urban water systems and management lead to unsustainable outcomes. Therefore, our current socio-technical systems, consisting of institutions, structures and rules, which guide traditional urban water practices, need to change. If a change towards sustainable urban water management (SUWM) practices is to occur, a transformation of ...
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Integrated water resource planning in the context of climate uncertainty
In many locations, climate change may significantly reduce urban water supplies and could also affect water demand. With uncertainty around future climate, supply-demand planning needs to adapt. This paper addresses the question: How does climate change alter Integrated Resource Planning (IRP) for urban water? The paper covers the setting of planning objectives in the face of climate change, ...
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Multiple conceptions of sustainable urban water systems: problem or asset?
This paper examines various conceptions that researchers and practitioners in the sector have about sustainable urban water systems, to discern what these conceptions are and whether they are complementary or divergent. The study is based on a literature review and field studies, including semi-structured interviews. The results show that the conceptions held by the various actors are largely ...
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Modelling the urban water cycle as an integrated part of the city: a review
In contrast to common perceptions, the urban water infrastructure system is a complex and dynamic system that is constantly evolving and adapting to changes in the urban environment, to sustain existing services and provide additional ones. Instead of simplifying urban water infrastructure to a static system that is decoupled from its urban context, new management strategies use the complexity ...
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Water service governance, technological change and paradigm shifts: a conceptual framework
This article offers a conceptual framework of the social factors enabling and inhibiting paradigm shifts in urban water supply and sanitation. We understand paradigm shifts as radical changes in the metabolism of urban water services, whereby change is informed by a distinct ethos. We reframe paradigm shifts as the function of two factors: 1) the agency of paradigm advocacy; 2) the institutional ...
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Towards water sensitive cities in Asia: an interdisciplinary journey
Rapid urbanisation, population growth and the effects of climate change drive the need for sustainable urban water management (SUWM) in Asian cities. The complexity of this challenge calls for the integration of knowledge from different disciplines and collaborative approaches. This paper identifies key issues and sets the stage for interdisciplinary research on SUWM in Asia. It reports on ...
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Security through diversity: moving from rhetoric to practice
In response to a range of contemporary urban water challenges, there is an increasingly urgent need to change the way water is used in our cities. In Australia, the ‘Security through Diversity’ policy has been introduced in a number of cities to help facilitate a shift towards sustainable urban water management. This qualitative case study research investigated the interpretation and ...
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Why is Germany 30 years ahead of England?
The question is asked why Germany in the field of water management is 30 years ahead of England? In terms of the delivery of integrated urban water management technologies, Germany is indeed 20 to 30 years in advance of England. The comparison is made on 12 dimensions and illustrates how dramatic the effect of governance can be in the adoption of innovations in water management and hence the ...
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The application of a Web-geographic information system for improving urban water cycle modelling
Research in urban water management has experienced a transition from traditional model applications to modelling water cycles as an integrated part of urban areas. This includes the interlinking of models of many research areas (e.g. urban development, socio-economy, urban water management). The integration and simulation is realized in newly developed frameworks (e.g. DynaMind and OpenMI) and ...
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Sustainability issues in the water supply sector of urban India: implications for developing countries
Rapid urbanisation, growing cities, high population growths, public ownerships of utilities, misgovernance and malpractices, poverty, subsidies, lack of adequate finances, and inefficient operations etc. are some of the common problems characterising most developing economies. In this sense, the Indian urban water supply sector represents several issues that are common to the water supply ...
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Building leadership capacity to drive sustainable water management: the evaluation of a customised program
This paper describes a customised, six-month, leadership development program (LDP) that was designed for emerging leaders in the Australian water industry who were promoting sustainable urban water management (SUWM). It also presents results from an evaluation of the program's benefits, costs and overall ‘return on investment’ (ROI). The program was designed to help build emergent leadership ...
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Innovation results of IAM planning in urban water services
The requirement to provide urban water services continuously while infrastructures are ageing, imposes the need for increasingly sustainable infrastructure asset management (IAM). To achieve and maintain adequate levels of service, the AWARE-P IAM methodology has been applied in collaborative projects launched by the National Civil Engineering Laboratory, in partnership with IST (Technical ...
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Infrastructure asset management – the TRUST approach and professional tools
Strategic asset management (AM) of urban water infrastructures faces the challenge of dealing with expensive and long-lasting assets of a very diverse nature and wide-ranging useful lives and costs. Typically, utility managers inherit an infrastructure with assets in assorted conditions and stages in their lifecycle. They are expected to manage their value in order to ensure adequate service, ...
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Exploring the effects of domestic water management measures to water conservation attitudes using agent based modelling
The urban water system's sustainable evolution requires managing both water supply and water demand within a complete urban water cycle framework. Such an approach, however, requires tools to analyse and simulate the complete system including both physical and cultural environments. One of the main challenges, in this regard, is the design and development of tools able to simulate the ...
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Metabolism-based modelling for performance assessment of a water supply system: a case study of Reggio Emilia, Italy
A new class of conceptual simulation tools, as a complement to physically based models, is becoming available to simulate the whole water cycle in urban areas for strategic planning, often involving the allocation of a great amount of financial resources. These simulation tools are required to estimate the impact of the today's decisions on the system performance over the next decades and to ...
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Economic market instruments and sustainable urban water use
Water is an economic good and as such has as a value to a spectrum of users, who are willing to pay for it. Consumers will use water until the marginal costs exceed the marginal benefits from use of an additional cubic meter of water. Similarly, producers will supply water until the marginal costs exceed the marginal return of an additional cubic meter of water supplied. This article surveys the ...
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Enabling sustainable urban water management through governance experimentation
A shift towards sustainable urban water management is widely advocated but poorly understood. There is a growing body of literature claiming that social learning is of high importance in restructuring conventional systems. In particular, governance experimentation, which explicitly aims for social learning, has been suggested as an approach for enabling the translation of sustainability ideas ...
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