• Energy Research
• environmental engineering close
• 12. Responsible consumption close

In the current study, we examine the Indonesian government's watershed management program, which was established in 2001. In 2005, the Coordination Team for Rescue of Water Resources (CTRWR) was established to execute the program on a national level. However, at the time, field implementation was a sectoral interest due to the lack of program integration. To this end, the Indonesian government promoted integrated watershed management in 2009, which since then has been implemented by all stakeholders (in Top–Down management form), with application limited to preparing and planning documents. This is mainly driven by the stakeholders’ lack of understanding with regard to watershed systems as integrated management units. Field implementation results have not yet been realized, including the promotion of community-based watershed management (through Bottom–Up management). The purpose of our research was to determine the index numbers by measuring the level of cooperation between watershed management workers based on the Village Watershed Model (VWM) specifically surface water which includes six variables: planning, participation, institutional, fund sharing, gender, and management systems. The method used was an ordinal measure with the Likert scale. Our data showed successful watershed management, in which five of the six VWM variables—planning, participation, institutional, fund sharing, and management systems—were in the “good” category with indices ranging from 73.08 to 78.27. The gender variable index (69.12) was in the “medium” category.

The basins of the Indus and Ganges rivers cover 2.20 million km2 and are inhabited by more than a billion people. The region is under extreme pressures of population and poverty, unregulated utilization of the resources and low levels of productivity. The needs are: (1) development policies that are regionally differentiated to ensure resource sustainability and high productivity; (2) immediate development and implementation of policies for sound groundwater management and energy use; (3) improvement of the fragile food security and to broaden its base; and (4) policy changes to address land fragmentation and improved infrastructure. Meeting these needs will help to improve productivity, reduce rural poverty and improve overall human development.

Spain has been pinpointed as one of the European countries at major risk of extreme urban events. Thus, Spanish cities pursue new urban plans to increase their resilience. In this scenario, experiences in the implementation of Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS) have increased substantially. Nevertheless, few cities have developed a global urban strategy for SUDS, lacking, in many cases, a method to identify strategic areas to maximize their synergetic benefits. Furthermore, there is still a need for a holistic Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) framework that considers the four pillars of SUDS design. The city of Gijón, NW Spain, has been selected as a case study due to its environmental and climatic stresses. This research presents the methodology developed for this city, which aims to analyze the need for SUDS implementation throughout the identification of strategic areas. With this aim, a combination of Geographic Information System (GIS) software and the MCDA Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) were proposed. The results show the potential for SUDS’ implementation, according to nine criteria related to the SUDS’ design pillars. We found that the areas where the implementation of SUDS would bring the greatest functional, environmental and social benefits are mainly located in consolidated urban areas.

According to the concerted efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE), the Information and Communication Industry (ICT) has received little attention as a significant contributor to GHG. ICT has a very significant role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. While climate challenges increase, there is a growing need to reduce Greenhouse gas emissions. The ICT sector has an important role in enabling significant reductions in those emissions and costs. This current study aims to examine the effects of GHGE on climate change in Canada with a focus on the ICT sector. This paper will provide a review of ICT definitions and Greenhouse gases and how GHGE can be reduced. This paper presents an approach to investigating the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on Greenhouse gases emission and its effect on climate change in Canada.

Energy use in households, including private transport, accounts for about 30% of primary energy use in industrialised countries. Therefore, households are important key drivers of energy use and related greenhouse gas emissions. In order to understand energy use related to water in households a detailed mathematical flow analysis of materials, energy, CO 2 emissions and costs (MMFA) for household water use was set up and tested for a specific family household in Brisbane, Australia. The simulation results for the current state of this household were well within 20% of the monitored data. After calibration, a detailed scenario investigation determined the impact of (i) potential and (ii) realistic reduction values for all relevant (a) behavioural and (b) technical parameters, including a shift from gas to a solar hot-water system. The reduction potentials for water use, greenhouse gas emissions, water-related energy consumption, water costs and water-related energy costs were 4-77%, 14-85%, 15-93%, 1-31% and 13-90% respectively. The study showed that for this household, technical improvements alone, without changing to a solar hot-water system, result in less than a 15% change in terms of energy and greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, combined behavioural and technical changes have a much higher reduction potential.

The Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jingjinji) region is the most densely populated region in China and suffers from severe water resource shortage, with considerable water-related issues emerging under a changing context such as construction of water diversion projects (WDP), regional synergistic development, and climate change. To this end, this paper develops a framework to examine the water resource security for 200 counties in the Jingjinji region under these changes. Thus, county-level water resource security is assessed in terms of the long-term annual mean and selected typical years (i.e., dry, normal, and wet years), with and without the WDP, and under the current and projected future (i.e., regional synergistic development and climate change). The outcomes of such scenarios are assessed based on two water-crowding indicators, two use-to-availability indicators, and one composite indicator. Results indicate first that the water resources are distributed unevenly, relatively more abundant in the northeastern counties and extremely limited in the other counties. The water resources are very limited at the regional level, with the water availability per capita and per unit gross domestic product (GDP) being only 279/290 m3 and 46/18 m3 in the current and projected future scenarios, respectively, even when considering the WDP. Second, the population carrying capacity is currently the dominant influence, while economic development will be the controlling factor in the future for most middle and southern counties. This suggests that significant improvement in water-saving technologies, vigorous replacement of industries from high to low water consumption, as well as water from other supplies for large-scale applications are greatly needed. Third, the research identifies those counties most at risk to water scarcity and shows that most of them can be greatly relieved after supplementation by the planned WDP. Finally, more attention should be paid to the southern counties because their water resources are not only limited but also much more sensitive and vulnerable to climate change. This work should benefit water resource management and allocation decisions in the Jingjinji region, and the proposed assessment framework can be applied to other similar problems.

AbstractIt has theoretical and realistic meanings to study the climate change's impacts on hydrology and water resources, so as to understand and solve some problems in hydrology and water resources, such as plan management, operation management, environmental protection, ecological balance and so on. And hydrology and water resource system has close relationship with industry, agriculture, city development and economic fields. This paper reviews the relationship between climate change and water resources, water circulating response of climate change. And then summarizes some study methods of analyzing the impacts of climate change on hydrology and water resources, such as generation technology for climate change scenario and hydrologic simulation. At last, it raises problems in study and puts forward the development trend, including perfecting the distributed hydrological model, improving the precision of climate models and hydrologic models and developing the two-way coupling techniques of climate models and hydrological models.

A computational network heat transfer model was utilised to model the potential of heat energy recovery at multiple locations from a city scale combined sewer network. The uniqueness of this network model lies in its whole system validation and implementation for seasonal scenarios in a large sewer network. The network model was developed, on the basis of a previous single pipe heat transfer model, to make it suitable for application in large sewer networks and its performance was validated in this study by predicting the wastewater temperature variation across the network. Since heat energy recovery in sewers may impact negatively on wastewater treatment processes, the viability of large scale heat recovery was assessed by examining the distribution of the wastewater temperatures throughout a 3000 pipe network, serving a population equivalent of 79500, and at the wastewater treatment plant inlet. Three scenarios; winter, spring and summer were modelled to reflect seasonal variations. The model was run on an hourly basis during dry weather. The modelling results indicated that potential heat energy recovery of around 116, 160 & 207 MWh/day may be obtained in January, March and May respectively, without causing wastewater temperature either in the network or at the inlet of the wastewater treatment plant to reach a level that was unacceptable to the water utility.