Reflexive adaptation for resilient water services: lessons for theory and practice

‘Adaptive management’ concern attempts to manage complex social-ecological and socio-technical systems in nimble ways to enhance their resilience. In this paper, three forms of adaptive management are identified, ‘scientific’ forms focused on collation of scientific data in response to management experiments, but more recent developments adding processes of collaboration as well as emphasising the need for reflexivity, that is, conscious processes of opening up debates to different perspectives and values. While reflexive adaptive management has been increasingly discussed in theory, there is a lack of examples of what its application means in practice. As a response, this paper examines an ‘Adaptive Planning Process’ (APP), seeking to apply reflexive adaptive management as a means to improve climate resilience in the UK water sector. The APP’s three inter linked workshops – Aspiration, Scenario and Roadmapping – were co-developed and trialled in a water utility. By describing and justifying the choices made in the development of the APP, the paper aims to reveal some of the challenges that arise when trying to design processes that achieve reflexive adaptation. The paper concludes that, if applied to planning for climate change, reflexive adaptation has the potential to explore multiple value positions, highlight different potential futures and acknowledge (and hence, partly address) power differentials, and therefore to offer the possibility of real change. On the basis of the trial, we argue that through tapping the depth and breadth of internal knowledge the APP process created the potential for decision making to be joined up across different parts of the utility, and hence offering new strategies and routes for addressing uncertainties and delivering more resilient water services

An assessment of sub-standard water pressure in South African potable distribution systems

Sub-standard residual water pressures in urban water distribution systems (WDS) are a prevalent phenomenon in developing countries – South Africa being no exception. The phenomenon of sub-standard pressure is poorly understood, with intermittent supply ultimately resulting when there is no residual pressure left in the system. This research addressed the prevalence and extent of sub-standard pressures by using hydraulic models of potable WDS for 71 South African towns, located in 17 different South African municipalities geographically spread over the country. The hydraulic models included 539,388 modelled nodes, which were analysed to determine the number of nodes with sub-standard pressure heads during peak hour flow conditions. The results show that the residual pressure head was <24 m at 16.5% of the model nodes under peak hour flow conditions, with 6.7% of the nodes having pressure heads <12 m. In contrast, the results also report relatively high pressures in certain parts of the systems, far in excess of the minimum requirement, underlining the need for better pressure management at both high and low ranges. It was also noted that the South African design criterion is relatively stringent compared with some other countries and could potentially be relaxed in future

Tap water costs and service sustainability, a close relationship

Water is currently an essential and strategic resource for society and its importance will rise in the future due to the increasing number of threats. However, water management is not currently up to par taking into consideration this well acknowledged importance. Generally speaking, water use is not efficient and loss figures are often too high. The reasons behind this situation are complex and diverse, however, in principle, they can be divided into four categories: cultural, political, social and economic. Since the latter are of most importance, this paper focuses on water costs from source to tap. The economic analysis presented quantifies the costs of a sustainable urban water service in a structured way. The second part of the paper present a case study in which the economic losses linked to leakage are assessed as a function of how expenses are recovered. The cost of apparent losses could also be assessed in a similar way and will always be higher, since apparent losses (unlike real ones) are present throughout the whole water cycle, thus increasing the unit costs.Cabrera Marcet, E.; Pardo Picazo, MA.; Cabrera Rochera, E.; Arregui De La Cruz, F. (2013). Tap water costs and service sustainability, a close relationship. Water Resources Management. 27(1):239-253. doi:10.1007/s11269-012-0181-3S239253271Almandoz J, Cabrera E, Arregui F, Cabrera Jr E, Cobacho R (2005) Leakage assessment through water networks simulation. J Water Resour Plan Manag ASCE. Nov-Dic. 2005 pp 458–466BDEW (German Association of Energy and Water Industries) (2010) Comparison of European Water and Wastewater Prices German Association of Energy and Water Industries, BonnCabrera E, Pardo MA, Cobacho R, Arregui FJ, Cabrera Jr E (2010) Energy audit of water networks. J. Water Resour. Plan. Manag. ASCE. Nov–Dic. 2010 pp 669–677Coase RH (1960) The problem of social cost. J Law Econ, October 1960den Blanken M (2009) Asset Management. A necessary tool for a modern water company AWWA International Conference on Strategic Asset Management. Miami 11–13 November 2009EPO (Eurostat Press Office) (2010) Facts and figures on the environment: from environmental taxes to water resources. Eurostat Press Office, Luxembourg, December 2010EU (European Union) (2000) Directive 2000/60/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2000. Off J Eur Communities 22.12.2000. Pp L 327/1 to L 327/72IWA (International Water Association) (2010) International statistics for water services. Montreal 2010. Canada. International Water Association, LondonKanakoudis V, Tolikas D (2001) The role of leaks and breaks in water networks: technical and economical solutions. J Water SRT - Aqua 50(2001):301–311Kanakoudis V, Tsitsifli S (2009) Water pricing policies in Greece: is there a Common Understanding?. 2nd International conference on water economics, statistics, and finance Alexandroupolis, Thrace, Greece, 3–5 July 2009.Kanakoudis V, Gonelas K, Tolikas D (2011) Basic principles for urban water value assessment and price setting towards its full cost recovery – pinpointing the role of the water losses. J Water Supply: Res Technol 60(1):27–39Logar I, Van den Berg J (2012) Methods to assess costs of drought damages and policies for drought mitigation and adaptation: Review and recommendations. Water Resour Manag. doi: 10.1007/s11269-012-0119-9Molinos-Senante M, Hernández-Sancho F, Sala-Garrido R (2012) Tariffs and cost recovery in water reuse. Water Resour Manag. doi: 10.1007/s11269-012-0111-4NRC (National Research Council) (2008) Desalination a national perspective. NAP Press, Washington, D.C. National Research Council, Ottawa, CanadaOECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2010) Pricing water resources and water and sanitation services. OECD, ParisOFWAT (Office of Water Services) (2009) Future water and sewerage charges 2010-15: Final determinations. OFWAT (Office of Water Services), Birmingham UKRogers P, Bhatia R, Huber A (1998) Water as a social and economic good: How to put the principle into practice. Global Water Partnership, Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency.Roth A (2001) Water pricing in the EU. A review. European Environmental Bureau (EEB), BrusselsWonnacott P, Wonnacott R (1990) Economics, 4th edn. John Wiley, 1990Zhu X, van Ierland EC (2012) Economic modeling for water quantity and quality management: a welfare program approach. Water Resour Manag. doi: 10.1007/s11269-012-0029-

Understanding the costs of investigating coliform and E. coli detections during routine drinking water quality monitoring

Bacteriological failure investigations are crucial in the provision of safe, clean drinking water as part of a process of quality assurance and continual improvement. However, the financial implications of investigating coliform and Escherichia coli failures during routine water quality monitoring are poorly understood in the industry. The investigations for 737 coliform and E. coli failures across five UK water companies were analysed in this paper. The principal components of investigation costs were staff hours worked, re-samples collected, transportation, and special investigatory activities related to the sample collection location. The average investigation costs ranged from £575 for a customer tap failure to £4,775 for a water treatment works finished water failure. These costs were compared to predictions for US utilities under the Revised Total Coliform Rule. Improved understanding of the financial and staffing implications of investigating bacteriological failures can be used to budget operational expenditures and justify increased funding for preventive strategies

Reliable, resilient and sustainable urban drainage systems: an analysis of robustness under deep uncertainty (article)

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Chemical Society via the DOI in this record.The dataset associated with this article is available in ORE at: https://doi.org/10.24378/exe.563Reliability, resilience and sustainability are key goals of any urban drainage system. However, only a few studies have recently focused on measuring, operationalizing and comparing such concepts in a world of deep uncertainty. In this study, these key concepts are defined and quantified for a number of gray, green and hybrid strategies, aimed at improving the capacity issues of an existing integrated urban wastewater system. These interventions are investigated by means of a regret-based approach, which evaluates the robustness (that is the ability to perform well under deep uncertainty conditions) of each strategy in terms of the three qualities through integration of multiple objectives (i.e. sewer flooding, river water quality, combined sewer overflows, river flooding, greenhouse gas emissions, cost and acceptability) across four different future scenarios. The results indicate that strategies found to be robust in terms of sustainability were typically also robust for resilience and reliability across future scenarios. However, strategies found to be robust in terms of their resilience and, in particular, for reliability did not guarantee robustness for sustainability. Conventional gray infrastructure strategies were found to lack robustness in terms of sustainability due to their unbalanced economic, environmental and social performance. Such limitations were overcome, however, by implementing hybrid solutions that combine green retrofits and gray rehabilitation solutions.This study was funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council through STREAM (EP/G037094/1) with Northumbrian Water Limited, BRIM (EP/N010329/1) and the final author’s fellowship Safe & SuRe (EP/K006924/1)

Animating inter-organisational resilience communication: a participatory social network analysis of water governance in the UK

open access articleResilience as a concept and resilience assessment as a practice are being explored across a range of social, ecological and technical systems. In this paper, we propose a new method and visualisation approach for interrogating the communication of resilience within organisational networks, using participatory social network analysis and message passing. Through an examination of the UK water sector organisational network, represented by multiple co-produced network graphs, we identify organisations having a key role in the communication of resilience regulatory and evidence messages, as well as highlighting the potential role of complexity tools in strategy formulation. Animations are presented showing the dynamics of resilience communication, which is discussed. Reflections on the use of participatory social network analysis are explored, as the method opens new doors to potentially examine how network changes could alter communication. Key insights highlight that perceived responsibilities for resilience in the UK water sector rest with a small core of organisations; water customers play a limited role in the two-way communication of resilience and water sector organisations do not communicate widely on resilience with other sectors (such as energy). Additionally, who an organisations’ neighbours are and what catalyses a message to be passed are important in determining how quickly messages spread. Results lead to a recommendation that high level governmental and policy organisations should engage to a greater extent with new resilience knowledge and consider the use of complexity tools in policy making. Policy in relation to resilience is not keeping pace with such knowledge, limiting the communication and learning of organisations who ardently follow policy and regulation. For inter-organisational cooperation to make a difference to water governance, such organisations need to be encouraged to communicate and embed the latest approaches in relation to resilience and complexity thinking and practice

Global resilience analysis of water distribution systems

© 2016 Evaluating and enhancing resilience in water infrastructure is a crucial step towards more sustainable urban water management. As a prerequisite to enhancing resilience, a detailed understanding is required of the inherent resilience of the underlying system. Differing from traditional risk analysis, here we propose a global resilience analysis (GRA) approach that shifts the objective from analysing multiple and unknown threats to analysing the more identifiable and measurable system responses to extreme conditions, i.e. potential failure modes. GRA aims to evaluate a system's resilience to a possible failure mode regardless of the causal threat(s) (known or unknown, external or internal). The method is applied to test the resilience of four water distribution systems (WDSs) with various features to three typical failure modes (pipe failure, excess demand, and substance intrusion). The study reveals GRA provides an overview of a water system's resilience to various failure modes. For each failure mode, it identifies the range of corresponding failure impacts and reveals extreme scenarios (e.g. the complete loss of water supply with only 5% pipe failure, or still meeting 80% of demand despite over 70% of pipes failing). GRA also reveals that increased resilience to one failure mode may decrease resilience to another and increasing system capacity may delay the system's recovery in some situations. It is also shown that selecting an appropriate level of detail for hydraulic models is of great importance in resilience analysis. The method can be used as a comprehensive diagnostic framework to evaluate a range of interventions for improving system resilience in future studies