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In the future, increasing pressure will inevitably be placed on the spatial planning system to improve its consideration of water management issues. Emerging challenges include designing for climatic extremes, reducing flood risk, managing increasingly scarce water resources and improving water quality. These issues need to be balanced with a range of other spatial planning priorities and objectives, including meeting new housing needs, facilitating economic growth, and creating and maintaining quality places. The sheer complexity of the issues surrounding water management and the impacts upon spatial planning mean that partnership working is essential to achieve an integrated approach. Planners need the expertise, and crucially the understanding, of engineers and hydrologists. However, there can be considerable misunderstanding and miscommunication between disciplines, often concerning the institutional context in which the various parties operate. A plethora of policies, tools and assessments exist, which can make integrated water management an overwhelming prospect for the planner. This paper attempts to identify and address some of the issues faced, as well as examining how planners embed hydrological issues in decision making and how engineers could better facilitate this.

Over a 20 year period 1996–2016, a new 223 ha town is being developed 10 miles west of Dublin's city centre on the south side of Lucan, County Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland (ROI). This €4 billion ‘Adamstown’ development is the first of four planning schemes in ROI to be approved as a strategic development zone – an integrated planning framework deemed suitable for creating sustainable neighbourhoods in sites of strategic economic or social importance to the state. The creation of sustainable neighbourhoods in ROI is facilitated through the implementation of a checklist of 60 indicators. This paper critically examines the attempts being made to consider sustainability within the development's overall infrastructure plan, specifically: transport, energy and water services, information technology and waste. Inadequacies in the existing development are linked to shortfalls in the sustainability checklist, by way of a comparison of infrastructure-related indicators from the ROI checklist with those derived for the UK and exemplar European projects (i.e. Bedzed, UK and Freiberg, Germany). The subsequent legacy for future residents of Adamstown is then considered in the context of ‘what if’ scenarios.

The rapid pace of urbanisation comes with considerable environmental implications including pressures on already stressed limited water resources. In urban areas, most of the water use is associated with water consumption in buildings. The second largest use of water is via taps. It is often assumed that water taps with low flow rates can contribute to reduced per capita water consumption. However, this is based on very little evidence. This paper presents the synthesis of a 13,000 high resolution observations made to investigate the actual water consumption of innovative (water saving) electronic taps and conventional mixer taps. High resolution flow-meters and data loggers were fitted into two washrooms in two different buildings of a higher education institution to record the water use through the basin taps. The recorded data provided information on duration, frequency of use and volume of water consumption per use. The data was helpful in identifying trends in hot and cold water use and therefore can be useful in estimating energy for producing hot water and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Analysis of the observed data suggests that the low flow taps have greater mean water consumption per event than the conventional taps and water consumption is more influenced by user behaviour rather than the technology.

This paper describes the implementation of life cycle assessment to investigate the environmental impact of 20 technologies suitable for treating extensive volumes of water produced during the oil and gas extraction processes. Data on the physical and operational attributes of technologies under consideration were assembled and their life cycle environmental impacts estimated over 15 year time period. The results were then incorporated in a decision support system which allows identification and prioritisation of potential technology combinations capable of producing water for nine designated industrial and agricultural end uses. In total, more than 618 technology combinations were investigated for their environmental impacts. The identification and prioritisation of technologies were done on the basis of their environmental and technical performance. This analysis showed that dissolved air flotation, absorbents, dual media filtration and reverse osmosis technologies offer relatively low environmental impact parts of systems for cleaning such process waters. Furthermore, the environmental assessment combined within the decision support system has revealed potentially valuable indirect downstream "benefits" from effects such as evaporative losses from wetlands in terms of the overall environmental impact of a treatment system.

This research investigates the effects of adjusting control handle values on greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater treatment, and reveals critical control handles and sensitive emission sources for control through the combined use of local and global sensitivity analysis methods. The direction of change in emissions, effluent quality and operational cost resulting from variation of control handles individually is determined using one-factor-at-a-time sensitivity analysis, and corresponding trade-offs are identified. The contribution of each control handle to variance in model outputs, taking into account the effects of interactions, is then explored using a variance-based sensitivity analysis method, i.e., Sobol's method, and significant second order interactions are discovered. This knowledge will assist future control strategy development and aid an efficient design and optimisation process, as it provides a better understanding of the effects of control handles on key performance indicators and identifies those for which dynamic control has the greatest potential benefits. Sources with the greatest variance in emissions, and therefore the greatest need to monitor, are also identified. It is found that variance in total emissions is predominantly due to changes in direct N2O emissions and selection of suitable values for wastage flow rate and aeration intensity in the final activated sludge reactor is of key importance. To improve effluent quality, costs and/or emissions, it is necessary to consider the effects of adjusting multiple control handles simultaneously and determine the optimum trade-off.

This study investigates sources of uncertainty in the modelling of greenhouse gas emissions from wastewater treatment, through the use of local and global sensitivity analysis tools, and contributes to an in-depth understanding of wastewater treatment modelling by revealing critical parameters and parameter interactions. One-factor-at-a-time sensitivity analysis is used to screen model parameters and identify those with significant individual effects on three performance indicators: total greenhouse gas emissions, effluent quality and operational cost. Sobol's method enables identification of parameters with significant higher order effects and of particular parameter pairs to which model outputs are sensitive. Use of a variance-based global sensitivity analysis tool to investigate parameter interactions enables identification of important parameters not revealed in one-factor-at-a-time sensitivity analysis. These interaction effects have not been considered in previous studies and thus provide a better understanding wastewater treatment plant model characterisation. It was found that uncertainty in modelled nitrous oxide emissions is the primary contributor to uncertainty in total greenhouse gas emissions, due largely to the interaction effects of three nitrogen conversion modelling parameters. The higher order effects of these parameters are also shown to be a key source of uncertainty in effluent quality.

AbstractInfrastructure is a means to an end: it is built, maintained and expanded in order to enable the functioning of society. Present infrastructure operation is characterised by: governance based on unmanaged growing demand, which is both inefficient and ultimately unsustainable; lack of integration of the end-users, in terms of the variety of their wants, needs and behaviours; separate and parallel delivery of different infrastructure streams prohibiting joint solutions. To achieve long-term sustainability, infrastructure needs to be designed and operated to provide essential service delivery at radically decreased levels of resource use. This new approach will need to: (1) incorporate the end-user, in terms of their wants and behaviours; (2) focus on the service provided; (3) use Information and Communication Technologies more effectively; (4) integrate the operation of different infrastructure systems; (5) be governed in a manner that recognises the complexity and interconnectedness of infrastructure systems; and (6) rethink current infrastructure valuation. Possible configurations incorporating these aspects with the explicit goal of contributing to long-term sustainability could be Multi-Utility Service Companies or “MUSCos”. This article presents new insights and ideas generated by considering the challenge of the transition towards a MUSCo infrastructure.

Abstract In the context of urban flood management, resilience is equal to resisting, recovering, reflecting and responding. The variety of causes of flooding and their consequences underpin the need for increased and internationally coordinated efforts to enhance technologies and policies for dealing with floods. This paper addresses this issue and presents some novel research ideas related to resilience to flooding in urban areas, which are under development within the EU FP7 project ‘Collaborative research on flood resilience in urban areas’ (CORFU). The approach adopted in this project aims to quantify the cost-effectiveness of resilience measures and integrative and adaptable flood management plans for different scenarios of relevant drivers: urban development, socio-economic trends and climate changes. It is believed that the way in which the different models are being put together, combined with the variability of conditions in case study areas in Asia and in Europe, will ultimately enable more scientifically sound policies for the management of the consequences of urban flooding.