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Sustainable Water Resource Management
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Sustainable Water Resource Management

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Water Management".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2021) | Viewed by 30376

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Mike Spiliotis

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Civil Engineering, School of Engineering, Democritus University of Thrace, 67100 Xanthi, Greece
Interests: water resources management; multi-criteria decision making of water resource management problem; multicriteria and fuzzy sets and logic (including the intuitionistic sets); investigation of uncertainty effects on hydraulic performance by using the fuzzy sets theory; fuzzy logic in hydrological modeling; hybrid fuzzy probabilistic analysis in hydrology; assessment of the risk (to drought, flood) based on multicriteria analysis; heuristic and metaheuristic optimization techniques for the management of water resources; water distribution networks; river engineering; applied hydraulics; hydrology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The term “sustainable development” was defined in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development as “development that can meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” The requirement of water sustainability is vital in the cases of cites with significant population growth (which influences the water, food, and energy demand), water bodies with significant water pollution, areas where climate change causes significant differences in thewater regime, etc. In the case of developing countries sustainability can be seen as a condition for survival.

Therefore,integrated water resource management can be seen as a complicated systemic process of promoting the coordinated development and management of water, land, and related resources, to maximize the resultant economic and social welfare in an equitable manner without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems (either in the present situation or in the future). Hence, an inherent characteristic of integrated water resources management (IWRM) is its commitment to balance the socioeconomic development of water resources with environmental sustainability (Setegn, 2015). Ηence, based on the above definition, the term Sustainable Water Resource Management will be used.

In the EU,sustainability is atthe core of the Water Framework Directive. According to the objective of the Water Framework Directive, all water bodies are classified as natural, heavily modified, or artificial. The target of the Directive is to ensure that all natural waters are of good ecological and chemical status. Simultaneously, artificial and heavily modified waters should bring a good ecological potential, although there is a possibility, in case of inability, this obligation to be postponed to further time horizon (Tsakiris, 2015). Therefore,sustainability is also vital in the case of developed counties not only forsurvival but also to improve the quality of life. The restoration of flowing waters has significant importance in this framework.

The inherent uncertainty of both the hydrological cycle and water demand creates the need for a long term analysis and the incorporation of extreme hydrological events. All these uncertainties strengthen the need for searching sustainable adaptive solutions instead of static simplified approaches.

More specifically, to achieve a Sustainable Water Resource Management in its entirety, complicated water resource systems must be considered including the three poles of the water resource management: water availability sources, water consumption centers, and the environment (health of ecosystems and status of water bodies). Methodologies of operation research, as well as tools from probabilities and fuzziness, could produce a systemic analysis including the complexity of the water systems and the uncertainty of the hydrological variables.

Many challenges should be addressed in this Special Issue: integrated and adaptive solutions because of climate change, concepts of echo hydrology such as environmental flow, climate change, population growth, mega-cities, use of new eco-friendly technologies and practices to reduce the water demand, a new vision about the water governance, etc. Furthermore, the adaption capacity of the proposed solutions must include extreme events, linked to climate change that will probably influence the quantity and quality of water resources.

Assist. Prof. Mike Spiliotis
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • water governance
  • climate change
  • water inequalities
  • integrated urban water frameworks
  • water–energy–food nexus
  • ecosystem services
  • drought
  • water demand
  • integrated water resourcemanagement
  • sustainability

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Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

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17 pages, 6253 KiB  
Article
Hydrological Modeling of Aquifer’s Recharge and Discharge Potential by Coupling WetSpass and MODFLOW for the Chaj Doab, Pakistan
by Muhammad Aslam, Muhammad Arshad, Vijay P. Singh and Muhammad Adnan Shahid
Sustainability 2022, 14(8), 4421; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14084421 - 8 Apr 2022
Cited by 12 | Viewed by 2580
Abstract
The estimation of the groundwater (GW) potential in irrigated areas is crucial for the sustainable management of water resources in order to ensure its sustainable use. This study was conducted in a selected area of the Chaj doab, Punjab, Pakistan, to quantify the [...] Read more.
The estimation of the groundwater (GW) potential in irrigated areas is crucial for the sustainable management of water resources in order to ensure its sustainable use. This study was conducted in a selected area of the Chaj doab, Punjab, Pakistan, to quantify the impacts of the pumping and the recharge on the aquifer therein. To that end, a groundwater flow model (MODFLOW) and a groundwater recharge model (WetSpass) were coupled to assess the conditions of the aquifer. The model was calibrated manually on twelve-year data (2003–2014) against the observed groundwater levels, and it was validated with five-year data (2015–2019). Three main scenarios (divided into ten subscenarios) were simulated for the future prediction of the groundwater: Scenario-I (to assess the impact of the pumping if the prevailing conditions of the years from 2003 to 2019 were to continue until 2035); Scenario-II (to assess the impact of the pumping on the aquifer by increasing the pumping capacity by 25, 50, 75, and 100% for the coming 10 years); and Scenario-III (to assess the impact on the aquifer of the decrease in the average groundwater recharge from the river by 50% by following the same pumping trend). The Scenario-I results show that there would be an 18.1 m decrease in the groundwater table at the end of the year 2035. The Scenario-II results predict decreases in the water table by 2.0, 5.5, 9.8, and 14.3 m in the year 2029 as a result of increases in the pumping capacity of 25, 50, 75, and 100%, respectively. The results of Scenario-III show that, with the decrease in the recharge from the rainfall, there would be a 0.7 m decrease in the water table, and that, from open-water bodies, there would be a 2.4 m decrease in the water table. These results are very helpful for determining the recharge and discharge potential of the aquifer. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Water Resource Management)
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19 pages, 7024 KiB  
Article
Flexible Goal Programming for Supporting Lake Karla’s (Greece) Sustainable Operation
by Mike Spiliotis, Dionissis Latinopoulos, Lampros Vasiliades, Kyriakos Rafailidis, Eleni Koutsokera and Ifigenia Kagalou
Sustainability 2022, 14(7), 4311; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14074311 - 5 Apr 2022
Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2376
Abstract
Sustainable management is a prerequisite for a lake to provide a range of ecosystem services. The prioritization of needs is a difficult task, especially when the needs are in conflict and threaten water security. Lake Karla, situated in the Thessaly plain, Greece, was [...] Read more.
Sustainable management is a prerequisite for a lake to provide a range of ecosystem services. The prioritization of needs is a difficult task, especially when the needs are in conflict and threaten water security. Lake Karla, situated in the Thessaly plain, Greece, was decimated in 1957–1962; due to environmental impacts, it was later refilled as a multipurpose reservoir with high ecological significance. The research objective is to achieve a compromise with respect to both the economic benefits derived from agricultural water use and environmental protection based on the minimum intersection. For this purpose, first, new managerial practices are introduced. Second, the ideas are quantified based on the hydrological budget, and these are used as input for flexible (fuzzy) programming. Under hypotheses about the acceptable range, the (flexible) fuzzy programming is identical with the MINMAX goal programming model, although the weights are not used directly in the first case. An understandable compromise (the maximum economic benefit from irrigation areas and the minimization of water retention time) is achieved, and the values of the membership functions can be used to verify the solution. The proposed solution leads to a quantitative proposition, incorporating new findings from modeling the recent real operation of the reservoir. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Water Resource Management)
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24 pages, 7527 KiB  
Article
SPI-Based Hybrid Hidden Markov–GA, ARIMA–GA, and ARIMA–GA–ANN Models for Meteorological Drought Forecasting
by Mohammed Alquraish, Khaled Ali. Abuhasel, Abdulrahman S. Alqahtani and Mosaad Khadr
Sustainability 2021, 13(22), 12576; https://doi.org/10.3390/su132212576 - 15 Nov 2021
Cited by 28 | Viewed by 3449
Abstract
Drought is a severe environmental disaster that results in significant social and economic damage. As such, efficient mitigation plans must rely on precise modeling and forecasting of the phenomenon. This study was designed to enhance drought forecasting through developing and evaluating the applicability [...] Read more.
Drought is a severe environmental disaster that results in significant social and economic damage. As such, efficient mitigation plans must rely on precise modeling and forecasting of the phenomenon. This study was designed to enhance drought forecasting through developing and evaluating the applicability of three hybrid models—the hidden Markov model–genetic algorithm (HMM–GA), the auto-regressive integrated moving average–genetic algorithm (ARIMA–GA), and a novel auto-regressive integrated moving average–genetic algorithm–ANN (ARIMA–GA–ANN)—to forecast the standard precipitation index (SPI) in the Bisha Valley, Saudi Arabia. The accuracy of the models was investigated and compared with that of classical HMM and ARIMA based on a performance evaluation and visual inspection. Furthermore, the multi-class Receiver Operating Characteristic-based Area under the Curve (ROC–AUC) was applied to evaluate the ability of the hybrid model to forecast drought events. We used data from 1968 to 2008 to train the models and data from 2009 to 2019 for validation. The performance evaluation results confirmed that the hybrid models provided superior results in forecasting the SPI one month in advance. Furthermore, the results demonstrated that the GA-induced improvement in the HMM forecasts was matched by an approximate 16.40% and 23.46% decrease in the RMSE in the training and testing results, respectively, compared to the classical HMM model. Consequently, the RMSE values of the ARIMA–GA model were reduced by an average of 10.06% and 9.36% for the training and testing processes, respectively. Finally, the ARIMA–GA–ANN, which combined the strengths of the linear stochastic model ARIMA and a non-linear ANN, achieved a greater reduction values in RMSE by an average of 32.82% and 27.47% in comparison with ARIMA in the training and testing phases, respectively. The ROC–AUC results confirmed the capability of the developed models to distinguish between events and non-events with reasonable accuracy, implying the appropriateness of these models as a tool for drought mitigation and warning systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Water Resource Management)
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Review

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13 pages, 301 KiB  
Review
Greywater as an Alternative Solution for a Sustainable Management of Water Resources—A Review
by Hanen Filali, Narcis Barsan, Dalila Souguir, Valentin Nedeff, Claudia Tomozei and Mohamed Hachicha
Sustainability 2022, 14(2), 665; https://doi.org/10.3390/su14020665 - 7 Jan 2022
Cited by 51 | Viewed by 20144
Abstract
In this paper, a comprehensive review on greywater is presented. Emphasis is given to the techniques used to treat and recover greywater, and special emphasis is placed on the risk of the existence of the novel coronavirus “SARS-CoV-2” in greywater and the possibility [...] Read more.
In this paper, a comprehensive review on greywater is presented. Emphasis is given to the techniques used to treat and recover greywater, and special emphasis is placed on the risk of the existence of the novel coronavirus “SARS-CoV-2” in greywater and the possibility of its spread via the reuse of this water. In general, greywater is considered wastewater collected from domestic sources, with the exclusion of toilet water (which is considered as blackwater). Greywater represents 50 to 80% of the total volume of wastewater all over the world. This review provides various aspects related to greywater, such as origins, characteristics, and existing guidelines for greywater proper treatment and reuse. Several approaches and techniques have been developed to study the performance of different greywater treatment systems. These methods are critically discussed in this article. In the context of sustainable development, water management, and taking into account the scarcity of water resources, particularly in arid and semi-arid areas, the use of treated greywater is one of the alternatives methods that can reduce the burden of withdrawals from the resource. In addition, some successful examples of greywater valuation experiences in Tunisia were examined. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Water Resource Management)
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