Search results for "Scarcity"
showing 10 items of 106 documents
Evaluation of the apparent losses caused by water meter under-registration in intermittent water supply
2009
Apparent losses are usually caused by water theft, billing errors, or revenue meter under-registration. While the first two causes are directly related to water utility management and may be reduced by improving company procedures, water meter inaccuracies are considered to be the most significant and hardest to quantify. Water meter errors are amplified in networks subjected to water scarcity, where users adopt private storage tanks to cope with the intermittent water supply. The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of two variables influencing the apparent losses: water meter age and the private storage tank effect on meter performance. The study was carried out in Palermo (Italy). Th…
Planning Rehabilitation Actions on Water Distribution Networks in Condition of Data Scarcity
2011
The paper shows a viable approach to the selection of water networks rehabilitation actions, in condition of data scarcity and uncertainty, based on the use of four concise performance literature indices, allowing the analysis and identification of efficient, reliable and robust rehabilitation alternatives, even if assessed on the basis of a relatively small amount of data. A promising statistical sampling method of water consumptions is also described, that may be fruitfully employed within the proposed approach for drafting water balances at network district scale in order to quantify the extent of leakages. The illustrated case study shows that the selected indices are capable to describ…
Water losses dynamic modelling in water distribution networks
2015
In the last decades, one of the main concerns of the water system managers have been the minimisation of water losses, that frequently reach values of 30% or even 70% of the volume supplying the water distribution network. The economic and social costs associated with water losses in modern water supply systems are rapidly rising to unacceptably high levels. Furthermore, the problem of the water losses assumes more and more importance mainly when periods of water scarcity occur or when not sufficient water supply takes part in areas with fast growth. In the present analysis, a dynamic model was used for estimating real and apparent losses of a real case study. A specific nodal demand model …
Becoming and Being a Creative and Entrepreneurial Mum in Finland
2020
This chapter explores the pathways of mothers with young children into cultural and creative industries (CCIs). These women can be described as mumpreneurs, meaning that they combine running a business enterprise with looking after their children. Typically unstable, insecure, and unpredictable, CCIs also offer scope for great self-engagement and personal satisfaction. At the same time, the current culture of intensive mothering has made motherhood more challenging than in the past. Mumpreneurship may be a way to ‘have it all’ for the women interviewed for this study. However, critical researchers have suggested that this individual ‘choice’ locks women into marginalised roles in the neolib…
Estimating the environmental and resource costs of leakage in water distribution systems: A shadow price approach.
2016
Water scarcity is one of the main problems faced by many regions in the XXIst century. In this context, the need to reduce leakages from water distribution systems has gained almost universal acceptance. The concept of sustainable economic level of leakage (SELL) has been proposed to internalize the environmental and resource costs within economic level of leakage calculations. However, because these costs are not set by the market, they have not often been calculated. In this paper, the directional-distance function was used to estimate the shadow price of leakages as a proxy of their environmental and resource costs. This is a pioneering approach to the economic valuation of leakage exter…
Assessment of water shortage in urban areas
2007
Recent history has demonstrated that extreme hydrological events such as floods and droughts can create additional stress on water supplies essential for human and ecosystem health. As stated several times by European Environmental Agency, the prudent and efficient use of water is thus an important issue in Europe and a number of policies and mechanisms have been used or have been formulated to ensure sustainable use of water in the long term. Urban uses are responsible of almost the 17% of the total European fresh water consumption and they are rapidly growing depending on the extension of urban areas and concentration of population in cities. The present chapter will discuss the phases in…
A Review of the Water Desalination Technologies
2021
Desalination is commonly adopted nowadays to overcome the freshwater scarcity in some areas of the world if brackish water or salt water is available. Different kinds of technologies have been proposed in the last century. In this paper, the state of the mainstream solutions is reported, showing the current commercial technologies like reverse osmosis (RO), Multi-Stages Flash desalination (MSF) and Multi-Effect Distillation (MED), and the new frontiers of the research with the aim of exploiting renewable sources such as wind, solar and biomass energy. In these cases, seawater treatment plants are the same as traditional ones, with the only difference being that they use a renewable energy s…
Role of CD36 in Oral and Postoral Sensing of Lipids
2011
Obesity and associated plethora of diseases constitute a major public health challenge worldwide. The conjunction of profound changes in our lifestyle and a thrifty genetic that evolved in an environment of food scarcity largely explains this epidemic situation. Food abundance promotes our specific appetite for the more palatable food generally rich in lipids. It is noteworthy that this attraction for fatty food is not specific to humans. Rats and mice also spontaneously prefer lipid-rich food in a free-choice situation. Detection of lipids in food requires the presence of specific sensors located in strategic places (e.g., oral cavity, small intestine, brain) whose activation results in a …
Franchising in Spain: Agency and capital scarcity perspectives
2005
Franchising is currently perhaps the most interesting formula, financially speaking, for generating self-employment, as the capital risk on the investment needed to set up a business is kept to a minimum. Since the aim of this research is to combine the agency and scarcity theories, we conducted a study throughout the total number of observations existing in Spain to determine the importance of the sector. Factors under examination included the number of distribution units that are franchised units as a proportion of the total number of units, the number of years since the firm was set up, yearly growth rate, geographical scope of operation, average start-up costs and average royalty rates.
Biohydrology research after Landau 2013 conference
2014
Biohydrology gives a new view on hydrological research. The impact of biota on hydrological processes was a disregarded topic in the early years of hydrology research. It has been present since the 1960s, but as a „Cinderella“ research topic. It emerged as a new aspect of the hydrological processes after the 1980s. In the 21st century, it has become a well established research topic, bringing new knowledge to aid understanding on how biota influence the hydrological cycle and the rates of hydrological processes. The importance of biohydrology research is growing, and the number of conferences, publications and research projects is being doubled every decade. The 4th Biohydrology conference,…