The post New WMO report provides global drought monitoring insights appeared first on The Source.
]]>Titled ‘Drought Impact Monitoring: Baseline Review of Practices’ and released under the banner of the Integrated Drought Management Programme (IDMP) – a joint initiative of the WMO and the Global Water Partnership (GWP) – the report presents a global overview of current drought impact monitoring practices, highlighting case studies and identifying examples of good practice and enabling environments that support effective monitoring.
The report provides operational guidelines to help countries establish or refine their drought monitoring systems and encourages cross-sector collaboration, open databases and tools to improve data accessibility, and tailored systems that can be adapted to local needs.
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]]>The post ASCE report calls for increased investment in resilience appeared first on The Source.
]]>Since 1998, the ASCE has prepared a comprehensive assessment of the nation’s major infrastructure systems using letter grades for each category and a concise but replicable methodology to analyse all aspects of system performance.
In terms of water infrastructure, the report assesses dams (D+), drinking water (C-), inland waterways (C-), levees (D+), stormwater (D) and wastewater (D+).
This year’s report finds nearly 50% of the grades increasing for the 18 categories assessed, crediting this to recent federal investments to improve US infrastructure.
The report recommends a comprehensive agenda over the next four years to sustain investment, prioritise resilience, and advance forward-thinking policies and innovations.
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]]>The post How utilities can adapt cap and trade for water security appeared first on The Source.
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In 1990, the US established the world’s first ever pollution trading system, popularised as “cap and trade.”
Governments sought a new way to reduce levels of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide that had accumulated since the industrial revolution. The idea was simple, if radical: let people buy and sell the ‘right to pollute,’ while developing local market-based solutions as a way to clean up the environment. While targeting energy emissions up in the sky, that first cap and trade was aimed at the pressing water problem of acid rain falling to earth.
It worked. The market-based approach slashed 36 percent of emissions in 14 years at a sixth of the cost–cleaner, faster and cheaper than anyone imagined possible. The top-down regulatory skeleton of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 also spurred technological and contractual innovation at the local and regional level. Energy producers had a platform to engage each other in the solution-making process, reinvesting savings to modernise their outdated systems.
Now the urban water sector is now experiencing a similar crisis–and opportunity.
Ageing utilities face urgent environmental challenges that simply cannot be tackled by existing governance and management frameworks. Conventional complex water infrastructure networks are typically “once-through, single-use” systems; they deliver clean water to various end-users while treating wastewater and stormwater as nuisances that must be captured and conveyed out of communities.
While enabling past growth, the old approach also insinuated an unrealistic sense of abundance that has led to unsustainable policies and practices. Outdoor spaces with lush green grass in arid urban regions across Australia or Arizona or Andalucía exemplify the world’s careless use of cheap water. Meanwhile, population growth, climate change, urbanisation, and most importantly ageing infrastructure continue to degrade both water quality and quantity–witness Flint, Michigan’s lead poisoning or Day Zero in Cape Town.
Our ‘new normal’ demands water professionals put an end to the lazy era of imagined abundance, and embrace a bracing new reality of innovative thinking and alternative water solutions. A disruptive first step is to diversify water portfolios–including water reuse, stormwater and rainwater harvesting, and desalination–to introduce flexibility and resilience against extreme weather, floods and droughts.
Yet even these efforts remain all too often incremental, uncoordinated and erratic; they are not yet systematic. To make a real structural shift, utilities must engage a broader group of actors in the process, and that is where cap and trade comes into play, this time for water systems.
The water sector is no stranger to this model. A smattering of cap-and-trade schemes already aim to address water pollution in various water bodies. Yet most such trading programmes have focused on water quality. Now their frameworks must be expanded to account for water quantity, encouraging efficiency, reinvestment, and supply diversification.
Communities in drought-stricken regions have started piloting similar systems as a way to achieve water conservation at the customer level or at a watershed scale. However, these schemes have yet to reach their full potential, especially when it comes to enhancing regional water reliability and resiliency.
Sceptics may argue that if resource credit trading markets are so effective, why have they not been used more often to address environmental and water issues?
One answer surrounds that initial word: “cap”. The 1990 acid rain cap-and-trade scheme allowed trading after two years, but significant emissions reduction didn’t come until 1995 when the regulatory cap on emissions went into effect. Ironically, a voluntary market often requires a regulatory ceiling, and aside from water quality-based limitations on effluent, caps and targets have until recently been absent from the water sector, especially when it comes to supply.
Regulatory moods are changing. California’s recent historic drought led Governor Brown to declare a state of emergency and introduce a rigid cap on water used by various water agencies. Now the state has made restrictions permanent, requiring utilities to meet certain water use targets by 2020. This type of regulatory vehicle, with pre-set targets, presents a great opportunity for a cap-and-trade model, especially for communities with a common pool of water resources such as a regional water system or a groundwater basin.
In this case, every drop of water a utility saves through efficiency measures or generated alternative means (e.g. reuse, stormwater capture, grey water systems) will leave a drop of water in the common pool. That water unit saved then acts as a credit a utility can trade, to subsidise their investment costs or avoid fines.
This market approach offers the flexibility for utilities to design and invest in water efficiency measures, or diversify their water supply portfolio, and meet their specific service area needs and capacity.
Let’s say a district has already harvested the low-hanging fruit of efficient toilets and showers, and hits a wall. Under cap and trade, that utility can either invest US$1500 per acre-feet to replace lawns–a slow, sensitive and costly approach–or use the regional trading platform to purchase conservation credits from a neighbouring district at a lower price, helping that utility replace their toilets. As the market tightens up and the cap becomes stricter, eventually utilities will move to the next layer of efficiency and conservation measures such as lawn replacement.
The basic idea is to incentivise people to do things that are cost effective, and invest in the community and system as a whole. Credit trading schemes can also help the region meet other environmental goals such as compliance with groundwater sustainability targets or environmental flow requirements.
Our Stanford team recently completed a study for two regional water systems in the Bay Area of California. We tested and modelled a cap-and-trade policy scheme to assess how various communities would respond to regional conservation or diversification targets. The results showed that when the market is set in a transparent way, with a platform that enables various actors to cooperate and collaborate, regional goals can be met in the most economical and timely manner.
As more global cities grapple with extremes of scarcity, floods, water quality degradation, ageing infrastructure, and dwindling financial resources, the water sector needs to rethink its conventional model and engage with a broader group of actors in addressing these challenges. Setting up virtual trading schemes as a policy instrument provides a platform to coordinate efforts, pool risks, and share costs while enhancing resilience.
As indicated even in that first acid rain case, the key to success for these instruments includes: regional caps; limited credits; flexibility to develop local solutions; a credit banking option (e.g. the common pool of water); an active monitoring system to inform the process and to enhance trust and transparency; and a penalty or fine that would guarantee action by all the beneficiaries.
Markets are no panacea. Yet if designed and set up correctly, a cap-and-trade model could facilitate the water sector’s transition into the 21st century. These tools have the potential to attract investment from diverse stakeholders, speed the modernisation of infrastructure, and drive a systematic approach that allows regional high-level goals to be achieved through bottom-up solutions.
Newsha Ajami is the director of Urban Water Policy with Stanford University’s Water in the West programme and NSF’s ReNUWIt initiative. She is a leading expert in sustainable water resource management, water policy, innovation, and financing, and the water-energy-food nexus.
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]]>The post What should cities do to link water security to upstream basin health? appeared first on The Source.
]]>What advice would you give professionals seeking to link urban water security to upstream basin health? By Nick Michell
Maria Teresa Vargas, Executive Director, Fundación Natura Bolivia
“Despite academic interest in payments for watershed services, many people react negatively to the idea that upstream landowners should be paid to provide a service. Watershared agreements were developed in the early 2000s as a way of side stepping such problems. The model was pioneered in the Bolivian village of Los Negros, when six downstream irrigators negotiated a groundbreaking deal with their upstream counterparts. By 2017, the initial six Bolivian farmers protecting 465 hectares had mushroomed to more than 6,000 families conserving 300,000 hectares across the Andes.
The underlying philosophy of Watershared is the same everywhere– people who produce water, share it; people who use water, share the benefits. However, Watershared does not rely on hydrological and economic studies to define the correct payment levels. Nor do the agreements focus on the opportunity cost of conservation. Rather, Watershared builds on one of the key findings of behavioural economics, that money is the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well. Watershared thus strengthens pro-conservation social norms by publically recognising individuals who contribute to the common good by conserving their ‘water factories’.”
Pablo Lloret, Environmental Manager, Metropolitan Drinking Water and Sanitation Company of Quito, Ecuador
“Starting from the fact that the water crisis is mainly a crisis of governance, my advice to link urban waters with security in their availability, both now and for future generations is to manage to ‘tie’ the city and its dynamics with effective use of the sources, that is, through payment for conservation. This ‘payment’ is achieved by creating a model of governance that channels economic resources generated by water users to a manager, from my experience, a ‘Water Fund’ that generates and maintains conservation programmes, long-term, to ensure the availability of water, both in quality and quantity.
The economic link, makes the water user aware of the need to conserve the environment, especially its water resources, with the advantage that a ‘Water Fund’ by grouping several users of water, becomes an ideal model for integrated water management, thus facilitating funding for a clear source conservation objective that ensures a strong impact in terms of urban water security.”
Andrea Erickson, Managing Director for Water Security, Global Water Team, The Nature Conservancy
“We need to foster more flexibility in governance and finance systems. Innovations in these areas, from what we’ve seen, surface best through transparent, multi-stakeholder approaches that identify source water protection as fundamental to sustainable growth and prosperity. Replicating singular ‘payment for ecosystem services’ successes is unlikely to move the needle. That’s what makes water funds so exciting. They provide a platform to bridge governance issues as well as science, jurisdictional, financial and other gaps to achieve common goals such as improving water quality.
Water funds provide an attractive vehicle to private companies, water utilities and others, to minimise treatment costs and reduce the risk of shortages. But that’s just the start. Our research shows potential for many other co-benefits such as climate adaptation and enhanced health and well-being. Looking across 4,000 of the biggest cities, we also found that half could implement source water protection for just US$2 or less per person per year. So, it’s a matter of helping the government and financial sectors capture the full breadth of value in water funds and other innovative approaches. This was our driver in creating a toolbox that can be adapted to local policy, legal, social and biophysical conditions.”
Luis Gamez Hernández, Public Service Company of Heredia, Costa Rica
“After 18 years of continuous and autonomous Payment of Watershed Services (PES) implementation in Heredia, Costa Rica, the keystone to achieving 100 percent financial self-sufficiency, has been making all the water company customers a partner in the conservation of the upper watershed. Inspired by ecological economics, the ESPH (a local water and electricity utility company) took pioneering steps in Costa Rica by making official the internalisation of environmental variables, such as forest conservation in private land, as a part of the equation in the water price, and the protection of future watershed services and benefits as a legitimate cost that must be paid monthly by all categories of customers.
An extra charge of US$0.03 per cubic metre generates a fresh stream of revenue that’s earmarked for PES. Participating farmers receive close to US$120 per hectare per year for forest protection in their properties. Currently, over 1000 hectares of forest in strategic groundwater recharge areas can be adequately protected and monitored. The pragmatic experience of ESPH shows the importance and payoff for tropical countries of investing in environmental education and relying on simple and low-cost measures to educate and lever the interest of the end users in paying for the watershed services they enjoy.”
Leah Bremer, University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization, Water Resources Research Center
“Cities around the world rely on healthy source watersheds for clean and ample water supplies as well as a suite of other benefits including biodiversity, carbon sequestration,
and recreation. Restoring and preserving watershed health requires a mechanism to link ‘upstream’ landowners and communities to ‘downstream’ urban water users. Water funds, “watershared”, and other similar investment in watershed services programmes, create institutions that allow downstream stakeholders to support and incentivise source watershed protection (ecosystem conservation, restoration, and sustainable agriculture) on lands owned and managed by rural communities, small farmers, and other land stewards. Designed effectively–and in close participation with rural land managers–these programmes can help to regulate water supplies and improve water quality, while also supporting rural livelihoods.
Trust between and among ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream’ actors is one key ingredient of an effective, equitable, and durable water fund that sometimes gets overlooked. This means building the evidence base around the links between source watershed protection activities and water security outcomes to ensure continued and increased financial support.”
Renzo Paladines, Director, Naturaleza y Cultura Ecuador
“My recommendation for professionals seeking to secure a reliable, equitably distributed water supply for populations in Latin American is first to educate all water users, including local governments, about the direct relationship between healthy ecosystems and clean, abundant water for cities. It is critical that the public recognises and values the provisioning of water as an environmental service.
You need to ensure that managers of public drinking water utilities are familiar with at least basic information about the current state of, as well as current and potential threats to, their water sources, to make sure that these water sources have some kind of legal protection, for example, through local legislation and/or community conservation agreements. You need to work with the public drinking water utility to establish a conservation fee charged equitably to its water users. These fees can be used to pay private landowners in a watershed to either halt or modify their activities, for example cattle grazing, in order to reduce pollution and facilitate ecosystem restoration. Finally, a transparent, long-term financial mechanism, like a trust, needs to be created to ensure that the conservation fees charged to water users are used exclusively for activities that benefit the watershed. In other words, make sure those conservation funds aren’t redirected toward non- conservation activities.”
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]]>The post IWMI brings in new leadership appeared first on The Source.
]]>The International Water Management Institute has appointed two new executives with broad experience in the conservation and use of transboundary rivers.
Claudia W. Sadoff arrived in October 2017 to serve as Director General of the Colombo, Sri Lanka-based scientific research organisation. She brings to the post three decades of building a global network of development partners, and distinguished experience as a global researcher and development practitioner.
“Through sustained and strategic efforts, Dr Sadoff has made a major contribution toward the achievement of global water security,” said Donald Blackmore, Chair of the Institute’s Board of Governors.
Sadoff previously led the World Bank’s Water Security and Integrated Water Resources Management division where she engaged with development experts and policy makers at the highest levels addressing challenges from climate adaptation to drought and flood response, and transboundary river basin management. Most recently, she has led major studies on water security in the Middle East and on water management in fragile and conflict-affected states.
“IWMI is uniquely well placed to champion the cause of improved water management worldwide, and I look forward to offering my knowledge, experience and energy in support of the Institute’s mission to deliver evidence-based solutions for water management,” Sadoff said.
To that end, one of her first decisions was to bring on board Mark Smith as IWMI’s new Deputy Director General (Research for Development), starting in May 2018. Smith comes from 10 years serving as Director of the Global Water Programme at IUCN, where he led major, cross-sector initiatives–BRIDGE, SUSTAIN-Africa and WISE-UP to Climate–at the interface of water resources, development, conservation, food security, governance and resilience.
As Deputy Director General, Smith will lead IWMI’s science agenda to address global development challenges for water security and natural resources management. His responsibilities will include assuring research quality and relevance; leading the identification and prioritisation of innovative research areas; and ensuring that IMWI’s work contributes effectively to the SDGs, the global climate agenda, and CGIAR’s Strategy and Results Framework.
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]]>The post Global food companies ranked on water risk management appeared first on The Source.
]]>Ceres, a sustainability nonprofit organisation, has ranked the 42 largest global food and beverage companies–nearly all US-based–on how effectively they are responding to water dependence, water security and operational water use efficiency.
Feeding Ourselves Thirsty: Tracking Food Company Progress Toward a Water-Smart Future, compares the companies to its first report released in 2015. It calls on major food companies to reduce the impacts of a warming climate–on both the global water supply and on their bottom lines–by adopting stronger practices to use limited fresh water resources more efficiently. It says that climate change is one of the biggest risks facing the US$5 trillion food industry.
“Smart water management is a business imperative for food companies, as the impacts of climate change and water scarcity and pollution accelerate around the world,” said Brooke Barton, Senior Director of Water and Food at Ceres, who co-authored the report. “Some corporate leaders are making strong progress, but the majority must do more to water-proof their businesses to protect and sustain our water supplies.”
Companies were divided into four industry categories: packaged food, beverage, agricultural products and meat, and analysed against actions in four categories of water risk management. The top scoring companies, out of a possible score of 100, by industry were: Nestlé (Packaged Food) 82 up from 64 in 2015; Coca-Cola (Beverage) 72 up from 67 in 2015; Smithfield Foods (Meat) 33 no change from 2015; and Olam (Agricultural Products) 49, which was not part of the 2015 analysis.
The report found a 10 percent improvement in the average score of the food sector’s management of water risk since 2015. The packaged food and meat industries made the biggest gains in improvement at 16 and 20 percent, respectively. However, the average score for the 42 companies benchmarked was still only 31 points and despite big gains, the meat and agricultural products industries continue to lag far behind the packaged food and beverage industries.
The analysis notes that the food sector is highly vulnerable to climate change impacts.
“Over 70 percent of the world’s irrigated land faces water shortage either chronically, seasonally, or during dry periods, and that means our food supplies are at risk,” said Kate A Brauman, Lead Scientist, University of Minnesota Global Water Initiative. “Food companies need to step up sustainable management of water resources, including by working collaboratively with their agricultural suppliers.”
The analysis found that, overall, companies need to improve most on governance and board oversight, wastewater management, integrating water risk into procurement processes and collaboration to protect watersheds.
“More than 85 percent of our water footprint is from growing and transporting crops, and turning those crops into food ingredients,” said Jerry Lynch, Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at General Mills, a packaged food manufacturer. “This underscores the role we must play to address water stewardship issues in our agricultural supply chain. We continue to identify opportunities to increase efficiency and conservation upstream of our operations, which is where we can have the most impact.”
The report used publicly available data from annual reports, sustainability reports and the CDP Global Water Report.
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]]>The post Water security urgent priority in Middle East and North Africa, says new report appeared first on The Source.
]]>“If we think of water resources as a bank account, then the region is now seriously overdrawn,” said Hafez Ghanem, World Bank Vice President for the Middle East and North Africa. “Drawing water from rivers and aquifers faster than they can be replenished is equivalent to living beyond one’s means, and it undermines a country’s natural capital, affecting longer-term wealth and resilience. But there are solutions, and they start with clear incentives to change the way water is managed.”
Beyond Scarcity: Water Security in the Middle East and North Africa draws on regional and global examples to show that limited water resources need not restrict the region’s future, but that a combination of technology, policy and management can convert scarcity into security.
Offering a comprehensive analysis of one of the region’s most significant challenges, the report examines the sustainability and efficiency of current water resources management, the challenges to maintain and extend access to affordable water services, and the growth of water-related risks and the adequacy of the actions taken to address them.
“Along with better water management, there is room for increasing the supply through non-conventional methods such as desalination and recycling,” said Guangzhe Chen, Senior Director of the World Bank’s Global Water Practice. “Fortunately, many countries have demonstrated success in implementing innovative programmes to reduce the amount of treated water that is lost through leakages before it reaches the customer, as well as producing nonconventional water.”
Over 60 percent of the MENA region’s population lives in areas with high or very high surface water stress, compared to a global average of about 35 percent. Yet despite water scarcity, the region has the world’s lowest water tariffs and, at two percent, the highest proportion of Gross Domestic Product spent on public water subsidies.
Low service tariffs discourage efficient use of water. Increasing water service fees would signal the true value of the dwindling resources and encourage conservation. It can also provide financing for water resources protection, infrastructure maintenance, and ensuring equitable and reliable service delivery.
The potential for recycling has yet to be fully exploited in the region. Currently, more than half of the wastewater collected in the MENA region is returned to the environment untreated, resulting in both health hazards and wasted water resources.
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]]>The post Framing a multi-stakeholder approach to water security appeared first on The Source.
]]>What role do corporate actors have in tackling water security issues and working towards the global development agenda more broadly? The question is no longer if corporate actors have a role, but what this role looks like, and how public organisations, the private sector and local communities can best work together to achieve shared development goals. The private sector has engaged in a range of different voluntary initiatives for a number of years, with many promoting increased transparency and accountability. These initiatives, particularly as they relate to water security, have however often lacked independent verification.
As we begin to formulate solutions and systems to tackle water insecurity and work towards meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) the need for a framework that champions multi-stakeholder solutions to complex water challenges becomes necessary. Water Stewardship offers such a framework and can provide the transparency, accountability and evaluative systems required for these challenges at both the site- and catchment-level.
Why water stewardship?
Demand for clean fresh water will continue to grow across all user groups; namely agriculture, households, industry, the energy sector and ecosystems, hardening the challenge to meet universal access to water and sanitation. Exacerbated by the effects of climate change, the pressure to meet both the water quality and supply needs of all users creates an increased risk for businesses, governments, communities and the environment (SDG Compass, 2017).
This challenge is not one for government or communities alone. As the SDG Compass outlines, businesses can lead in the stewardship of water in various areas of operation to contribute to achieve SDG 6, including:
- Sustainable water withdrawals
- Improved water quality through effluent treatment
- Improved water efficiency through application of 5R principles: reduce, reuse, recover, recycle, replenish
- Equal, affordable, and safe access to water, sanitation, and hygiene for employees and communities
- Protection of water-related ecosystems and biodiversity
The private sector has an important role to play in safeguarding the long-term availability of clean water and the provision of sanitation through the adoption of water stewardship; developing management and governance strategies and frameworks that address water risks for both their own business and the watersheds in which they operate. In doing so the private sector has a responsibility and an opportunity in leading sustainable development in water resource management.
The AWS Standard
Water security and how water is currently managed concerns all areas of society, including retailers, consumers, government, non-governmental organisations and civil society organisations. These groups are increasingly asking how major water users are managing water and whether they are being responsible water stewards. The AWS has led the development of a globally consistent framework that lays out the expectations of responsible water stewardship, outlined in the AWS International Water Stewardship Standard (AWS Standard).
The AWS Standard defines a set of water stewardship criteria and indicators for how water should be stewarded at a site- and catchment-level in a way that is environmentally, socially, and economically beneficial. Implementing the AWS Standard focuses on four key goals:
- Sustainable water balance
- Good water quality
- Healthy important water-related areas
- Good water governance.
The market for water stewardship is still emerging and the case studies below highlight the potential for growth in the approach. Early lessons indicate that companies will invest in water stewardship to better understand the opportunities for water efficiency on site. But the process is also a powerful tool for building stronger relationships and a social license with community and government stakeholders at site and catchment scales.
From site to catchment case studies
The Tianjin Economic-technological Development Area (TEDA), one of China’s largest Economic and Development Zones, has partnered with Water Stewardship Australia (WSA) and the local authority to roll out a long-term project using the AWS Standard to create change around the way that water is understood, used and disposed of by industries, institutions and communities. The AWS Standard is providing a new roadmap for water users to understand their own water use, catchment context and shared concerns in terms of water governance, water balance and water quality to engage in meaningful action that benefit people and nature. The project focuses on three tasks: 1) to adopt the AWS Water Stewardship at Industrial Park management committee level, 2) launch a long-term AWS certification and recognition scheme in TEDA, and 3) develop necessary infrastructure and mechanisms to support the AWS framework, such as a data system and communication platform.
Further examples from companies like Ecolab, a global leader in water, hygiene and energy technologies and services, are demonstrating the proactive role of the private sector on taking action to maximise their contribution to SDG6. In 2012 Ecolab partnered with World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to field test and implement the framework at its Taicang manufacturing plant, which is located in a water-sensitive area in the Taihu basin of China’s Yangtze region. In 2015 it was the first site to be independently certified under the AWS’s global standard for water stewardship. “Water stewardship is vital to both a healthy environment and a healthy economy,” said Ecolab Chairman and CEO Douglas M. Baker, Jr. “We help more than one million customers around the world reduce their water footprints, and believe it’s essential that we also leverage this expertise to advance water stewardship within our own operations.”
Ecolab is one of nearly 30 leading organisations from across sectors to advance the efforts of AWS to protect the world’s limited freshwater resources. In Australia, Inghams Enterprises (Inghams) a leading integrated poultry producer employing 9000 staff with AUD$2.1 billion annual turnover has become the first AWS gold standard certificate holder.
At the Inghams Somerville plant on the Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, the local stream was often referred to as ‘the most polluted waterway in Victoria’. While the plant has had only limited impact on the stream since its wastewater was connected to the Melbourne sewerage system, Inghams is the largest enterprise on the stream and the plants significant growth potential and its ‘social license’ were considered important assets from a business perspective. Over the past 10 years Inghams have embraced the Stewardship approach as a user friendly, meaningful standard system that can be relied upon to deliver benefits to all users of water and to help communicate their sustainability ethos and credentials to customers, government, community, staff and other stakeholders. The process has also allowed Inghams to understand and quantify the benefits of installing an Advanced Water Treatment Plant and to measure the impact once it had been installed, which included reducing municipal supply and waste disposal by 70%.
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]]>The post Four cities to pilot water gamification models appeared first on The Source.
]]>The EU project, called POWER (Political and sOcial awareness on Water EnviRonmental challenges), is working with two UK cities–Leicester and Milton Keynes–and two water supply companies in Jerusalem and Sabadell.
“The pilot cities are currently testing a beta version of the DSP–beginning to upload documents regarding water issues, and developing gamification models as a way of interacting with the public,” Carl Holland, Project & Finance Manager at POWER, told The Source.
Holland explained that the DSP will be populated with information about water related issues by experts and used to communicate these issues to decision makers, key stakeholders and the public in order to increase awareness. Anyone can become involved once the DSP is live although it is currently in a beta stage of development.
“The aim is to increase awareness and knowledge of water related issues–the DSP will provide a tool for experts to communicate with a broad public,” added Holland. The DPS will go live from summer 2017 with a mobile friendly version due later in the year.
The main goals of each city include;
- Jerusalem: through the regional water utility, Hagihon, the city is to promote water conservation behaviours, quantifiable water savings and improve awareness regarding water quality.
- In Milton Keynes water is scarce, too, therefore, with the help of social awareness incentives, total consumption should be reduced.
- Leicester aims to strengthen the awareness of extreme weather events, as it is “endangered by surface water floods”. It will work to provide real-time river water levels and predictive warnings for combined sewer overflows in specific geographical areas of the city.
- In Sabadell water is delivered in two qualities, as drinking water and non-drinking water. The water utility CASSA wants to actively involve citizens by implementing an information system that enables real-time information about the quality and conditions of service.
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]]>The post Water science and technology, multiplying research through collaborations appeared first on The Source.
]]>The water crisis remains one of the top five global risks, according to the recently published World Economic Forum Global Risks Report 2017. Water is a risk of high likelihood and high impact that is closely linked to the other most serious risks identified in the report, including extreme weather events, major natural disasters and a failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Water professionals, from all areas of the water sector, and in all regions of the world, find themselves at the centre of this crisis, and are increasingly being called upon to deliver solutions to it. The sector’s response is complicated by a disconnect between the leading science and technology research, and water utilities, cities and river basins where it might be applied to solve the challenges facing water resource management.
How do we address the potential risks involved in this disconnect? Firstly, we need to identify the needs of different stakeholders because this is key to guiding development of water science and technologies; secondly, we need to find ways to better connect the research and practice silos within the water sector; and thirdly, we must work with a broader group of stakeholders, inside and outside the sector, including social scientists and citizens groups, to promote the positive value of water.
Current developments in water science and technology are often dependent on what has been evolving in other sectors, such as advanced decision systems, ICT or biotechnologies. These emerging technologies are often disruptive. This requires water professionals to be aware of advances taking place and to learn from other sectors. Collaboration is critical to finding solutions in an increasingly interconnected world.
A recent meeting of science and technology leaders, convened by the IWA, re-confirmed the importance of collaborations. Participants identified six areas on which water professionals must focus to enhance water science and technology:
Optimisation and efficiency gains in current practices
Rebuilding all existing infrastructures is not realistic. Small infrastructural changes that incorporate novel technologies, better instrumentation and automation to improve efficiency, could provide an alternative in many places.
Role of data, information and communication technologies
Data science and communication technologies will increasingly contribute to process design and improvements to consumer engagement, transparency, compliance and to greater efficiency. For this paradigm shift to take place, capacity building and changes to management practices will be necessary.
Building resilience in the face of uncertainty and rapid change
In an era of great climate and hydrological uncertainty, we must build resilience by placing greater emphasis on risk and vulnerability assessments, indices for resilience, embedding natural capital in our systems, and through customer-centric approaches.
Demonstrating the value of water for productivity and economic growth
If the value of water is to be fully appreciated, we need the tools to engage and inform consumers in a way that leads to changed behaviours. The positive value of water has to be promoted by water utilities, but must also reach outside of the water community.
Improving livability through public and environmental health
To improve livability requires good public and environmental health, supported by sound scientific and technical evidence. This needs to be translated into meaningful public discourse. Social science research and financial analysis are important to demonstrate and quantify benefits to customers, the environment and economy.
Influencing policy and regulation through science and technology
Science and technology have an important role to play influencing policy and regulation. This is best achieved through multi-stakeholder and cross-sector collaborations. In order to influence policy, we need a vision, evidence-based approaches, and guidance on how to do it.
Informing different stakeholders in other sectors on the global trends and challenges in water science, technology and management, is a critical first step. IWA Specialist Groups have recently developed a compendium identifying the hot topics, innovations and global water trends that will have impact in solving water challenges.
This is one example of how the IWA is uniquely placed to bring together different stakeholders, and create stronger impact through science and innovation to better influence policy. Multi-stakeholder dialogues on different topics and in different regions can further enhance collaborations, and create stronger research impact through its applications in both policy and practice.
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