Water Cycle and Circular Economy: Developing a Circularity Assessment Framework for Complex Water Systems

© 2020 The Authors. Water – the most vital resource, negatively affected by the linear pattern of growth – still tries to find its positioning within the emerging concept of circular economy. Fragmented, sectorial circularity approaches hide the risk of underestimating both the preservation of and impacts to water resources and natural capital. In this study, a game changing circularity assessment framework is developed (i.e. MSWCA). The MSWCA follows a multi-sectoral systems approach, symbiotically managing key water-related socio-economic (i.e. urban water, agro-food, energy, industry and waste handling) and non-economic (i.e. natural environment) sectors. The MSWCA modelling framework enables the investigation of the feedback loops between the nature-managed and human-managed systems to assess water and water-related resources circularity. The three CE principles lie at the core of the developed framework, enabling the consideration of physical, technical, environmental and economic aspects. An indicators database is further developed, including all the relevant data requirements, as well as existing and newly developed indicators assessing multi-sectoral systems’ circularity. The MSWCA framework is conceptually applied to a fictional city, facilitating its understanding and practical use.Horizon 2020 research and innovation program HYDROUSA (grant agreement No 776643)

Nature-based solutions as enablers of circularity in water systems: A review on assessment methodologies, tools and indicators

Water has been pushed into a linear model, which is increasingly acknowledged of causing cumulative emissions of pollutants, waste stocks, and impacting on the irreversible deterioration of water and other resources. Moving towards a circular model in the water sector, the configuration of future water infrastructure changes through the integration of grey and green infrastructure, forming Nature-based Solutions (NBS) as an integral component that connects human-managed to nature-managed water systems. In this study, a thorough appraisal of the latest literature is conducted, providing an overview of the existing tools, methodologies and indicators that have been used to assess NBS for water management, as well as complete water systems considering the need of assessing both anthropogenic and natural elements. Furthermore, facilitators and barriers with respect to existing policies and regulations on NBS and circularity have been identified. The study concludes that the co-benefits of NBS for water management are not adequately assessed. A holistic methodology assessing complete water systems from a circularity perspective is still needed integrating existing tools (i.e. hydro-biogeochemical models), methods (i.e. MFA-based and LCA) and incorporating existing and/or newly-developed indicators.Horizon 2020 research and innovation program; CERCA program; Slovenian Research Agenc

Validating circular performance indicators: The interface between circular economy and stakeholders

Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. The development and application of appropriate Circular Economy indicators is an issue that concerns both the scientific and the business community, as well as decision makers. The existing gap between research, policy and practice could be bridged by using a dynamic indicators selection approach that combines both expert and participatory practices. This study aims to develop such a novel approach for the selection of indicators based on views and needs of practitioners, whilst considering the complex interdependencies of the indicators and determining their importance. Twenty circularity indicators for the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems nexus are selected and ranked by different stakeholders. The interrelationships of the indicators are identified using the Interpretive Structural Model, resulting in six levels of importance. Cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis further enabled the classification of the twenty indicators into four categories based on their driving and dependence power. The results indicate that seven indicators— one related to regeneration of natural environment principle, four related to keep resources in use, and two related to design out negative externalities—are the driving indicators to Circular Economy. The approach can be applied to other sets of indicators as well, enabling their prioritization and implementation with other systems.COST Action CA17133 Circular City; Horizon 2020 innovation projects HYDROUSA (grant agreement no. 776643) and HOUSEFUL (grantagreement no. 776708)

Encoding optical control in LCK kinase to quantitatively investigate its activity in live cells.

LCK is a tyrosine kinase that is essential for initiating T-cell antigen receptor (TCR) signaling. A complete understanding of LCK function is constrained by a paucity of methods to quantitatively study its function within live cells. To address this limitation, we generated LCK*, in which a key active-site lysine is replaced by a photocaged equivalent, using genetic code expansion. This strategy enabled fine temporal and spatial control over kinase activity, thus allowing us to quantify phosphorylation kinetics in situ using biochemical and imaging approaches. We find that autophosphorylation of the LCK active-site loop is indispensable for its catalytic activity and that LCK can stimulate its own activation by adopting a more open conformation, which can be modulated by point mutations. We then show that CD4 and CD8, T-cell coreceptors, can enhance LCK activity, thereby helping to explain their effect in physiological TCR signaling. Our approach also provides general insights into SRC-family kinase dynamics

Assessing circularity of multi-sectoral systems under the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) nexus

The Multi-Sectoral Water Circularity Assessment (MSWCA) is a methodological framework developed for circularity assessment of the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems nexus. It involves five methodological steps and includes an indicators list for the selection of case specific indicators. This study expands the MSWCA to provide a systematic approach for selecting indicators, considering system’s circular actions and multi-functionality, the capture of implemented changes, the three CE principles and the Sustainable Development Goals. Furthermore, this study differentiates between benchmark and dynamic circularity assessment and applies the expanded MSWCA in a water system of the HYDROUSA H2020 project. The benchmark assessment indicates that the HYDROUSA system achieves a 75% increase of water circularity, 76-80% increase of nutrients circularity and 14% reduction of operational `carbon footprint compared to the baseline scenario. The dynamic assessment highlights that additional measures can improve the system’s circularity performance (e.g. water circularity can reach 94%) and mitigate risks occurring from uncontrollable changes

What does it take to renature cities? An expert-based analysis of barriers and strategies for the implementation of nature-based solutions

Data availability: Data will be made available on request.Supplementary data are available online at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479724003712#appsec1 .This paper uses an expert-based methodology to survey the barriers and strategies related to the implementation of nature-based solutions (NBS). The ambition of the paper is to offer a bird's eye overview of the difficulties encountered by NBS deployment and ways to overcome them. With a wide participation of 80 experts from COST Action Circular City, we identify barriers specific to 35 pre-defined NBS of the following four categories: Vertical Greening Systems and Green Roofs; Food and Biomass Production; Rainwater Management; and Remediation, Treatment, and Recovery. The research sheds light on how a major interdisciplinary – yet predominantly technically-oriented - community of scientists and practitioners views this important topic. Overall, the most relevant barriers are related to technological complexity, lack of skilled staff and training programs and the lack of awareness that NBS is an option. Our results highlight concerns related to post implementation issues, especially operation and maintenance, which subsequently affect social acceptance. The paper identifies a “chain” effect across barriers, meaning that one barrier can affect the existence or the relevance of other barriers. In terms of strategies, most of them target governance, information, and education aspects, despite the predominantly technical expertise of the participants. The study innovates with respect to state-of-the-art research by showing a fine-grained connection between barriers, strategies and individual NBS and categories, a level of detail which is not encountered in any other study to date.The work was carried out within the COST Action CA17133 Circular City (“Implementing nature-based solutions for creating a resourceful circular city” (http://www.circularcity.eu), funded within the EU Horizon Programmes and duration 22 October 2018–21 April 2023). Hence, the authors are grateful for the support and would like to acknowledge all participants of the Circular City workshops that contributed during the discussions on barriers and strategies for Nature-Based Solutions implementation at the workshops in February and March 2021. Joana A.C. Castellar (FJC2021-047232-I) and Lucia Alexandra Popartan (FJC2021-047857-I) acknowledge the support from Juan de la Cierva Formación grants financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and European Union “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR. Joana A.C. Castellar and Joaquim Comas acknowledge EdiCitNet project (grant agreement 776665) and Multisource project (grant agreement 101003527), both from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research Program. The authors would like to thank the Government of Catalonia through Consolidated Research Groups 2021 SGR 01283 (ICRA) and 2021-SGR-01352 (LEQUIA). The ICRA researchers wish to express their thanks for funding from the CERCA programme/Government of Catalonia. Lucia Alexandra Popartan acknowledges the support of project Clepsidra (Ref: TED2021-131862B–I00) and the Juan de la Cierva 2021 grant, reference FJC2021-047857-I, financed by MICIN/AEI/10,13039501100011033 and the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR. Finally, the authors would like to thank CRUE-CSIC agreement with Elsevier for the Open Access funding