Search results for "RESOURCES"
showing 10 items of 1614 documents
Environmental Benefits of Wastewater Treatment: An Economic Valuation
2009
The need of economic research into the design and implementation of policies for the efficient management of water resources has been emphasized by the European Water Framework Directive (Directive 2000/60/UE). The efficient implementation of policies to prevent the degradation and depletion of water resources requires determining their value in social and economic terms and incorporating this information into the decision-making process. A process of wastewater treatment has many associated environmental benefits. However, these benefits are often not calculated because they are not set by the market. Nevertheless, the valuation of these benefits is necessary to justify a suitable investme…
Security Standards Applied to Drinking Water
2021
This chapter presents security standards as applied to drinking water, based on the assumption that freshwater sources face huge threats for humankind both qualitatively and quantitatively due to uncertain global changes, namely population growth, rapid urbanization, and climate change. The study investigates whether the International Featured Standards (IFS—Food), which are complementary to HACCP (Hazard analysis and critical control point), can be used as a system of indicators to measure water security. The case study focuses on bottled water, by identifying structural and contingent risk factors for water as essential food and investigates the suitability of the IFS instrument as an ind…
Design of an acoustical decision support system for town and traffic planning
2005
The town planning and the traffic urban planning studies of our modern cities lead us to emphasize the impact that urban activities and movements have on the acoustic level and annoyance. In Italy the enforced rules and laws on noise pollution provide us with an optimal procedure for the measurement, valuation and noise control across the urban territory. The control of the acoustic climate of a city depends on the acoustic zoning of the urban territory which fixes restrictive limits of exposition for each area. The aim of the present paper is to assess acoustic tools of calculation and the territorial information system, useful as a decision support system for town-planning and territorial…
Water transfer from Basilicata to Puglia: a technical, economic and institutional challenge
2007
The necessity of supplying Puglia by transfer of water resources from Basilicata (250 Mm/year mainly for civil use but also for agricultural and industrial uses) and another bordering region (Campania for 200 Mm/year only for civil use) arises from the scarcity of water resources inside Puglia, where precipitation is very low (400 mm/year), rivers are few and with limited watersheds and costal aquifers are overexploited with salt intrusion. Moreover recent droughts have pointed out the need for revising water supply policy in Puglia, looking for the increment of the transfer of water resources from Basilicata (50 Mm/year) and Campania (32 Mm/year) and the development of feasibility studies …
The Management of Water Resources during Drought in Southern Italy
1999
The aim of this paper is to describe how one of the most severe droughts of the century in Sicily has brought awareness of the insufficiency of the water resources system supplying Palermo, due not only to the lack of timely infrastructural measures, but also of an appropriate decisional framework. The experienced shortage has directed research efforts to overcome this problem. As a matter of fact, the 1989–90 drought gave clear evidence of how an heavy hydrologic failure can result in a real crisis depending on the system which suffers from it. Unplanned urban expansion and increased demands levels, mixed with the lack of a drought-oriented water managenment, have produced considerable dis…
The Intervention of Hydrogeophysics in the Economics of Groundwater Exploitation and Management in Sicily
1989
Abstract The problem of the preservation of water resources in Sicily presents various aspects, some of which have been treated by a number of works. Among the different applied methodologies, the geophysical ones occupy an important place. Their contribution, directed to an economic and efficient exploitation and management of groundwaters, can be useful for selected “risk” areas as well as for more regional programmes. In fact, uncontrolled drillings on relatively rich aquifers occur in several zones of this island; the economically disadvantageous exploitation causes also heavy impoverishment and pollution phenomena. The fragmentation of charges and the lack of a planning Regional Body m…
Final Considerations and Open Scenarios
2016
European river contract experiences demonstrate a growing integration between these contractual agreements and the other instruments of water resources management, and urban and territorial planning. Therefore, river contracts represent innovative places for a new governance of river ecosystems and territories, also in compliance with subsidiarity principle. The twofold nature of these contractual agreements—technical dimension and concertative approach—together with their expected wide evolution, allow to identify river contracts not only as sectoral tools for water resource protection and management, but also as catalysts of a new culture of water, recalling the deep interrelationships ex…
On Sustainable Management in Local Governance of Water: a Prospective Localized Study
2006
In the face of the changes in the planet's natural resources and of their unequal distribution, it is becoming more urgent that contemporary societies oversee environmental assets in a global manner. Although international directives, when they are transposed into national laws, may set specific objectives, meeting them at the local level is as yet an uneven enterprise. Nevertheless we hope to demonstrate, using a case-study involving local tensions over water resources, that public management of the crisis may be developed that effectively involves the civic society, by using the incentives and enforcement tools of central government and of local institutions.
A Decision Support Tool for Water and Energy Savingin the Integrated Water System
2015
Abstract In the last decades, a growing attention on energy saving associated with water resources usage and leakages reduction has been recorded at both national and international level. Scientific research has focused on implementation of several methodologies aimed at the understanding of energy transformation processes occurring in the integrated water system. The main concern is then identifying energy impacts associated to each macro-area of integrated water system, such as collection, treatment and distribution, and analysing the potential interactions between them. Unfortunately, only overall energy consumptions are usually available at national level. The main objective of the pape…
Emerging topics in scientific research on global water-use efficiency
2019
AbstractA bibliometric analysis of research articles published on water-use efficiency was performed using the Web of Science database and evaluated. Journal titles, publication years, subject categories, keywords and countries publishing were obtained. A number of 2077 papers were retrieved, two-thirds of them published in the last decade. The articles were published in 439 journals, with Agricultural Water Management, Agronomy Journal, Crop Science, Field Crops Research and Indian Journal of Agricultural Sciences the most productive. Most of the leading productive journals have Impact Factors in the top quartiles of the Journal Citation Reports. Agronomy, Plant Sciences, Water Resources a…