Seeking to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all” is an admirable Sustainable Development Goal and an honourable commitment of the United Nations and its Member States regarding the human right to...
Nowadays, water service marketization has become a global trend, and the quality of public services has gradually become an important factor affecting the input and output of urban water utilities. This paper defines the connotation of service qualit...
Improving water efficiency in farming systems is one of the major challenges of these decades. Water scarcity due to climate change, together with the increasing demand of food, is leading experts from around the world find appropriate indicators for...
Data relative to the water services industry in Italy indicate that there is a serious infrastructure gap between the southern regions and isles and the rest of the country. In these geographical areas, water utilities are provided with substantial p...
Recently, in the context of the Integrated Water Resources Management, demand policies are playing a more important role as opposed to traditional supply policies based on the construction of large hydraulic infrastructures. In this new context, wate...
Management practices reputed to be the best are being introduced widely in the agricultural sector. The identification of what these best management practices are for a given cultivation area requires thorough assessment, using indicators that reduce...
There has been very limited research on water use efficiency for soil conservation (WUE-SC) in typical water scarce regions such as the lower Heihe River Basin, where there is serious wind erosion and the soil conservation service plays a key role in...
Some major future global challenges are linked to more efficient use of water for irrigation to respond to the growing water scarcity coupled with the increasing food demand. Although irrigation advisory services (IASs) are considered effective instr...
This study analyzed the relevance of governance structure for efficient revenue collection by Brazilian water utilities (WUs). Data were collected from the National Information System on Sanitation (SNIS) for 127 Brazilian WUs, covering a balanced lo...
Stormwater management is of great importance in large shrinking cities with aging and outdated infrastructure. Maintenance of vegetated areas, particularly referred to as green infrastructure, is often aimed at mitigating flooding and the urban heat...
This paper presents a benchmarking study of the water and wastewater industry in Italy. A three-stage modeling approach was implemented to measure the efficiency of 53 utility operators. This approach is based on the implementation of network and con...
Frontier efficiency methods have been recurrently used in the water sector to assess the performance of water utilities. These methods are also used for yardstick regulation, with greater efficiency being sought by creating competition between the ut...
In airport operations management, accurately estimating the service durations of ground support equipment such as Potable Water Trucks (PWTs) is essential for improving resource allocation efficiency and ensuring timely aircraft turnaround. Tradition...
Frequency is an important parameter of a power system. It is of great significance to maintain its stability, especially in the current development scenario of large-scale interconnected power systems. Thermostatically controlled appliances (TCAs) ar...
Deployment of CTA-2045–enabled devices is increasing in the U.S. market. These devices allow utilities or third-party aggregators to control appliance energy use in homes, and could also be applied to end uses in small commercial buildings. This stud...
The Mediterranean basin is an area particularly exposed to fire risk due to its climate and fire-prone vegetation. In recent decades, the frequency and intensity of wildfires increased, leading to negative effects on forests, such as a decrease in tr...
This article reports the outcome of a performance study of the water service provision industry in Italy. The study evaluates the efficiency of 21 “private or public-private” equity and 32 “public” equity water service operators and investigates con...
Freshwater is becoming scarce worldwide with the rapidly growing population, developing industries, burgeoning agriculture, and increasing consumption. Assessment of ecosystem services has been regarded as a promising way to reconcile the increasing...
Public water supply, urban wastewater and stormwater management, and urban waste management are structural public services, essential to well-being, public health, and the safety of populations as well as to economic activities and environmental prot...
One of water utility’s managerial challenges is to make a balance in between two distinctive managerial goals, cost-effective provision of water service and improving customer satisfaction of water service. As management priorities of the water utili...
Water is an important input for irrigated agriculture. However, the irrigation sector, especially in developing countries, often faces pressure to secure water for production activities and maintain irrigation services. To sustain the supply and deli...
The efficient management of water resources and services continues to be a concern in many of the small island states of the Caribbean. There are growing concerns over the ability of governments in the region to ensure the good management and provisi...
Ecosystem services (ESs) are a multiple whole composed of multiple services and their multiple relations, which can be expressed as tensors (multiple functions of multiple vectors). This study attempts to introduce the concept and method of tensors i...
The present paper introduces the creation of an algorithm and the software used to determine the energetic performance and monitor the efficiency of hydraulic pumps working in various industrial applications, such as water supply systems, water treat...
The controversy between the performance of public and private ownership of water and wastewater services is common worldwide. In most cases, this discussion is biased due to ideological issues or insufficiency or inconsistency of information. This st...
Water scarcity is becoming a global concern for many reasons as its consumption increases. This research aimed to analyze sustainability inequalities in the water consumption of EU countries. Descriptive statistics using data for four AQUASTAT period...
Neglecting ecosystem services has impeded sustainable urban–rural development, particularly in terms of the efficient flow of water supply services between urban and rural areas. This study focuses on the Fenhe River Basin, evaluating water sup...
Managing the water-energy-nutrient nexus for the built environment requires, in part, a full system analysis of energy consumption, global warming and eutrophication potentials of municipal water services. As an example, we evaluated the life cycle e...
The greater competing demand for water requires an efficient use of water resources. Therefore, an optimum management is necessary in order to deal with the constraining factors. In African countries, irrigated agriculture is the largest user of surf...
3 November 2015
Natural ecosystems provide society with important goods and services. With rapidly increasing populations and excessive utilization of natural resources, humans have been enhancing the production of some services at the expense of others. Although th...
Section 195(b) of South Africa’s Constitution calls for the efficient use of resources in public administration, while the White Paper on Local Government similarly emphasizes the efficient provision of basic services such as refuse collection...
Enhancing the supply efficiency of ecosystem services plays a central role in improving both natural ecosystems and human well-being. Taking the Loess Plateau of Northern Shaanxi as an example, this study utilizes InVEST to assess the ecosystem servi...
In 2017, the government of Ecuador established the minimum quantity of water required to be provided for free by drinking water utilities. Ecuador recognized the access to water as a fundamental human right because it guarantees the good living, know...
Determining the price of water yield service is the core of watershed compensation. This is necessary to establish a reasonable and scientific compensation mechanism and achieve the efficient management of water. Unlike previous studies, this study e...
In Spain, the water supply service is a municipal responsibility and in general is a sector without competitors. For this reason, an efficiency analysis attains greater significance. This study uses Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to estimate the eff...
Economic evaluation of farmland is an important issue in the agricultural sector. The aim of this study was to quantify the economic value of land in the farmland area of the Reclamation and Irrigation Board of Capitanata (Apulia region), differentia...
This research examines the viability of the design of environmental taxes in the achievement of sustainable waste management in the Addis Ababa Administration (AAA) of Ethiopia. It has employed an empirical qualitative method. It first shows the mutu...
Specific forest restoration aims to maximum ecosystem services (ESs); however, the complex trade-offs among ecosystem services pose considerable challenges for fulfilling such goals. Based on forest restoration on Hainan Island, China, we integrated...
Understanding the spatial pattern of ecosystem services is important for effective environmental policy and decision-making. In this study, we use a geospatial decision-support tool (Marxan) to identify conservation priorities for habitat and a suite...
The recognition of the natural environment as an element that provides ecosystem services to society has led to an increased interest in the study of these services and the implementation of payment for environmental services (PES) initiatives. Altho...
Canal lining is commonly used to reduce seepage loss and increase water use efficiency. However, few studies have quantitatively estimated the seepage control effects of different lining materials under different service times. Ponding tests were con...
In recent years, achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is becoming a major challenge for local governments. This research focuses on the role of Spanish local governments in the fulfillment of SDG-6, which aims to ensure the availability...
10 March 2021
Analyzing costs and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions could be of great importance for the water utilities to supply water services in a healthy and sustainable manner. In this study, we measured the eco-efficiency of several water utilities in England...
This study applies panel techniques with macro variables to analyze the connection between date palms production and water management in GCC countries using the Bayesian random and mixed effects models. Also, this study utilizes panel-corrected stand...
Water is one of the primary resources provided for maintaining quality of life and social status in urban areas. As potable water is considered to be a primary need, water service has usually been managed without examining the economic and environmen...
Water distribution networks (WDNs), an interconnected collection of hydraulic control elements, are susceptible to a small disturbance that may induce unbalancing flows within a WDN and trigger large-scale losses and secondary failures. Identifying c...
Access to reliable water supply is critical for sustainable development and public health, yet many peri-urban and rural communities in the developing world face challenges such as poor maintenance, faulty infrastructure, and inadequate governance of...
Soft rubbery materials are capable of withstanding large deformation, and stretched rubber contracts when heated. Additionally, rubber balloons exhibit non-monotonic pressure–volume curves. These unique properties have inspired numerous ingenio...
Urban water systems are an example of complex, dynamic human–environment coupled systems which exhibit emergent behaviors that transcend individual scientific disciplines. While previous siloed approaches to water services (i.e., water resources, dri...
This paper focuses on the legal and institutional framework of urban water services in Spain, emphasizing water sanitation by using proposals that would positively contribute to wastewater management in Brazil. The recent Brazilian Federal Law No. 14...
of 15