Resilient Water Services and Systems

The Foundation of Well-Being

Petri S. Juuti, Harri Mattila, Riikka Rajala, Klaas Schwartz, Chad Staddon, Petri S. Juuti, Harri Mattila, Riikka Rajala, Klaas Schwartz, Chad Staddon

• Publisher: IWA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781780409788
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Scienze ambientali

Resilient Water Services and Systems: The Foundation of Well-Being provides an overarching framework on water and sanitation services and how they are coping with resilience, aging infrastructure and climate change. The Editors present conceptual evidence about resilience backed by case studies that demonstrate resilience in practice. There are 13 case studies, from Asia, Africa, Europe and North and South America, providing informative perspectives from around the world. This is a timely collection of historic and contemporary evidence that will have increasing relevance in the coming decades. This volume will be of relevance to both scholars and practitioners."Resilient water services are the key to water security across the world. Sustaining them is a challenging task in high-income countries where aging infrastructure is a critical issue, and in low-income countries where new infrastructure is needed and ability-to-pay is a more formidable barrier to success. The editors have compiled a succinct analysis and assembled case studies that cover diverse regions and contexts. From this book the reader will gain a wealth of knowledge about water services, as well as rich vicarious experiences from the cases."Neil Grigg, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University, USA

© IWA Publishing 2019. Petri Juuti, Harri Mattila, Riikka Rajala, Klaas Schwartz and Chad Staddon Resilient Water Services and Systems: The Foundation of Well-Being DOI: 10.2166/9781780409771_0001

Chapter 1

Resiliency is the key for sustainable water services

P. Juuti, H. Mattila, R. Rajala, K. Schwartz and C. Staddon

The overall framework for water services development is resiliency. It is needed more and more when global climate is becoming more difficult to forecast. Water services are of fundamental importance to human life and the everyday function of communities. The invaluable role of water services is, yet, surprisingly poorly recognized, mainly since they are commonly taken for granted. Only if water services fail do they seem to get recognized by the commons including citizens, policy-makers and decision-makers (Prevos, 2018).

Moreover, there are other megatrends affecting the resiliency of water services as well. Population growth, migrations, urbanization and large refugee camps caused by natural disasters or wars around the world are creating uncertainty in services.

Cities worldwide face several common challenges in the water and sanitation sector which can be tackled by developing viable policies and principles at appropriate regional, national and local levels. We need research that aims to reveal historical path dependencies and to present those of today and the future that create bottlenecks as well as path dependencies that prevent meeting the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs; https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/).

At the same time, research is needed that will reveal strategic decisions and principles that have proved to be positive from a long-term perspective. That kind of historical study sheds light on the complexity of water supply and sanitation services at the edge of any political, economic, social, technological, ecological or legislative (PESTEL) changes. Thus, a trustworthy outline of the future must be based on historical analysis. We have to learn how earlier choices affect development paths. We can look back into history to pinpoint the factors of success and turning points. This requires analyzing the environment, water supply and sanitation, and mental concepts in a long-term perspective.

In an historical context, the growth of urban centers is a continuous and even an escalating trend. Many of these centers are located in developing economies while the ensuing problems are centered on the poorest people. The most severe constraints are highly institutional including poor living conditions, lack of democracy, poor hygiene and health services, illiteracy, corruption, and lack of proper water and sanitation services. Especially, women and children suffer from these constraints.

The major part of the future population growth is projected to take place in the cities of the developing and emerging countries that are currently undergoing rapid growth. Much of the urban growth occurs in unplanned peri-urban areas often vulnerable to floods and without proper infrastructure, presenting major issues for sustainable development and well-being (United Nations Population Division, 2018).

The recent study by UNICEF and WHO (2017) shows that currently as many as 2.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water globally, 4.5 billion are without safe sanitation facilities, and 0.9 billion practice open defecation. To our mind, this is the most serious global catastrophe, and it happens silently and continuously. According to McDonald et al. (2011), up to two-thirds of mankind will suffer from chronic water scarcity and/or polluted water by 2050, if improvements are not made. Tracking down the bottlenecks that are preventing positive development in the sector is urgently needed. Achieving and sustaining water security in both developed and developing countries will become more complex along with economic growth.

The World Economic Forum (2016) ranked water crisis as the highest global risk on economies over the next ten years. The largest human health/mortality risk comes from inadequate water supply and sanitation. This is due to inadequate institutions and infrastructure that are unable to provide potable water and safe sanitation. This is effectively a man-made hazard (Sadoff et al., 2015). Lack of good governance is also related to this (Hukka et al., 2010). From 2000 to 2015 access to piped water in Africa increased, however the urban population grew even faster. This resulted in the decline of piped water from 40% in 2000 to 33% in 2015. Many utilities are unable to cover basic operations and maintenance costs (van den Berg & Danilenko, 2017). The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Brazil in 2012 defined pathways to a safer, more equitable, cleaner, greener and more prosperous world – the green economy. “The Future We Want” document noted that water is at the core of sustainable development (UN, 2012). Investments in water security and economic growth are interlinked. Infrastructures deliver benefits if backed by appropriate institutions, best available knowledge and information (OECD, 2016).

Along with the worldwide challenge of aging infrastructure, we will need better management, institutions and overall governance for water services. Since some 90% of water, 95% of sewerage, and close to 100% of stormwater systems are publicly owned, we will need public policy reforms. Though privatization has largely failed, it brought pressure on public utilities to develop their management. The options for water services improvement can include, among others, better rules of the game (Lobina, 2013), continuous improvement vs. reforms (Katko, 2016), remunicipalization (Kishimoto et al., 2015), people orientation (Sharp, 2017), efficiency improvement (Eureau, 2017), renovation of aging infrastructure (Hukka & Katko, 2015), proper asset management (Alegre & Coelho, 2012), leak detection (Hamilton & Charalambous, 2013), integration of water and wastewater (Katko et al., 2010), fair water pricing (OECD, 2010), integrated water resources management – also across national borders and supra-municipal cooperation (Pietilä et al., 2010).

Resilience in water and sanitation services is a very current subject at the moment. There is abundant literature on water resources and climate change resilience as well as on-going processes on resilient cities by the Rockefeller Foundation and OECD, yet very little literature exists on actual water services (Hollnagel et al., 2006; Jaffe, 2011; Bocchini et al., 2013; Butler et al., 2014; WASREB, 2015; Leclert et al., 2016; Gonzales & Ajami, 2017; OECD, 2017; Pagano et al., 2017; UKWIR, 2017). Brears (2017) discusses demand management to increase water security due to climate change and urbanization. The Global Water Security & Sanitation Partnership of the World Bank finds the following values most crucial: Sustainability, Resiliency, Inclusion, Financing, and Institutions. Most of the related research is related to climate change and stormwater and as such are not comparable to our project. In floods, the global number of casualties is some 25,000 per annum, while due to lack of safe WSS, some 6–8 million people die every year from water-related diseases. Thus, the lack of WSS kills 300 times more people than floods worldwide. The latest figures, 2.4 billion people without safe water and 4.5 billion without safe sanitation, present the most serious global catastrophe. Figure 1.1 presents an overview of water resilience in human settlements for our study.

Figure 1.1Overall framework and approach for water resilience in human settlements: Histories, integrated water services, management in water and sanitary services, major challenges and the Goals of Sustainable Development and Futures.

1.1 APPROACH AND OVERALL FRAMEWORK

The overall framework and approach of the book is illustrated in Figure 1.1.

The overall idea was that this research and the book would use a bottom-up approach and individual contributors would have quite a lot of flexibility in their chapters. We think that this is also resiliency. Following this approach, individual contributors are able to pinpoint the real issues in their case studies, we just give them concept and general guidelines.

The big idea is that resilient water services and systems are the foundation of well-being, and resiliency is the key for sustainable water services. This book will first cover resilience in water and sanitation services, and then look at the water security and resilience. That is followed by historical development paths and means for winning the challenge of aging water services infrastructure. Aging water infrastructure is a global challenge now. This is followed by several case studies from various parts of the world. These case studies include: Aging Water Infrastructure in the United States, and the challenge of universalizing essential water services in Latin America and the Caribbean. The next section of the book focuses on rethinking resilience by asking how we could address severe disruptions of critical infrastructure. It includes case studies: Water services in Riga City under different socio-economic situations and changing population; Incorporat...