Integrating sciences to sustain urban ecosystem services

Effective water management within urban settings requires robust multidisciplinary understanding and an appreciation of the value added to urban spaces by providing multifunctional green-blue spaces. Multifunctional landscapes where ecosystem service provisions are ‘designed-in’ can help ‘transition’ cities to more sustainable environments which are more resilient to changing future conditions. With benefits ranging from the supply of water, habitat and energy to pollutant removal, amenity and opportunities for recreation, urban water bodies can provide a focal point for reconnecting humans and nature in otherwise densely built-up areas. Managing water within urban spaces is an essential infrastructure requirement but has historically been undertaken in isolation from other urban functions and spatial requirements. Increasingly, because of the limits of space and need to respond to new drivers (e.g. mitigation of diffuse pollution), more sustainable approaches to urban water management are being applied which can have multiple functions and benefits. This paper presents a review of ecosystem services associated with water, particularly those in urban environments, and uses the emerging language of ecosystem services to provide a framework for discussion. The range of supporting, provisioning, regulating and cultural ecosystem services associated with differing types of urban water bodies are identified. A matrix is then used to evaluate the results of a series of social, ecological and physical science studies co-located on a single stretch of a restored urban river. Findings identify the benefits of, but also barriers to, the implementation of a transdisciplinary research approach. For many, transdisciplinary research still appears to be on the edge of scientific respectability. In order to approach this challenge, it is imperative that we bring together discipline specific expertise to address fundamental and applied problems in a holistic way. The ecosystem services approach offers an exciting mechanism to support researchers in tackling research questions that require thinking beyond traditional scientific boundaries. The opportunity to fully exploit this approach to collaborative working should not be lost

Maximising multiple benefits from sustainable drainage systems: identification and decision support

This paper describes efforts in Scotland UK to assess urban diffuse pollution sources, pathways and sinks; to establish mitigation measures, which can address waterborne urban pollution and also provide multiple benefits. The paper will describe the results from an extensive review exercise, which culminated in the development of a new decision support tool. The tool is intended to help urban planners and water managers tackle urban diffuse pollution with mitigation measures, which could provide multiple environmental and societal benefits, in addition to delivering pollution mitigation

Risk Management as a Basis for Integrated Water Cycle Management in Kazakhstan

Integrated Water Cycle Management (IWCM) aims to bring together a diversity of social, environmental, technological and economic aspects to implement sustainable water and land management systems. This paper investigates the challenges and opportunities facing Kazakhstan as it its efforts to move towards a more sustainable approach to managing its finite and highly stressed water resources. The use of a strategic-level risk governance framework to support a multi-disciplinary Kazakh-EU consortium in working collaboratively towards enhancing capacity and capability to address identified challenges is described. With a clear focus on addressing capacity building needs, a strong emphasis is placed on developing taught integrated water cycle management programmes through communication, stakeholder engagement and policy development including appropriate tools for managing the water issues including hydraulic models, GIS-based systems and scenario developments. Conclusions on the benefits of implementing an EU-style Water Framework Directive for Central Asia based on a risk management approach in Kazakhstan are formulated

Innovation in wastewater near-source tracking for rapid identification of COVID-19 in schools

'Comment' article. Experience from the past month in most of the countries in which the school year has restarted is that as community cases rise, more children become infected. Wastewater-based epidemiology using near-source tracking (NST) provides public health officials insight into the carriage of COVID-19 within discrete groups of people for whom rapid action could alleviate the risk of a much larger outbreak. Wastewater NST could be the first line of defence for high-risk populations and could offer long-term advances in public health surveillance after COVID-19