Search results for "resource"
showing 10 items of 4058 documents
ECONOMIC AND TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY OF WASTEWATER PLANTS: A BASIC REQUISITE TO THE FEASIBILITY OF WATER REUSE PROJECTS
2006
The water reuse could be considered essential both from a social and also an environmental and health point of view. In light of the growing importance of water reuse as an alternative source of water resources in many regional areas, the objective of this paper is to analyse the efficiency of wastewater treatment plants. Efficient performance, both in technical and economic terms favours reuse possibilities and, therefore, increases the water supply. An analytical benchmarking methodology based on non-radial measures gives us an efficiency indicator for each input considered in the wastewater treatment process. These indicators, obtained by means of mathematical programming techniques, are…
Desertification and Water Scarcity as a Security Challenge in the Mediterranean
2009
There is a new perception of a global dimension: environmental security. The protection of our fixed and shared environment is gradually coming to people’s attention as an obligatory requirement for equitable development, in order to prevent disasters related to environmental security and to avoid conflicts. The Euro-Mediterranean Region is also immersed in this general trend partly as a consequence of more frequent severe environmental events, such as forest fires, floods and landslides, droughts, torrential rains, heat waves and water scarcity. The Southern and Eastern shores of the Mediterranean undergo even more harsh environmental impacts affecting the stability of the land, its capaci…
Climate change impact on SWAT simulated streamflow in western Kenya
2008
Weather and climate extremes such as droughts and floods have far reaching impacts in Kenya. They have had implications in a variety of sectors including agriculture, water resources, health, energy, and disaster management among others. Lake Victoria and its catchment support millions of people and any impact on its ability to support the livelihoods of the communities in this region is of major concern. Thus, the main objective of this study was to assess the potential future climatic changes on the Nzoia catchment in the Lake Victoria basin, and how they might affect streamflow. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool was used to investigate the impact of climatic change on streamflow of the …
Modeling belowground water table fluctuations in the Everglades
2010
[1] Humid lands, such as riparian zones, peatlands, and unsubmerged wetlands, are considered among the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems, providing a bountiful habitat for a large number of plant and animal species. In such ecosystems, the water table dynamics play a key role in major ecohydrological processes. The aim of the present study is to test with field data a recent analytical model for the estimation of the long-term probability distribution of the belowground water table position in groundwater-dependent environments. This model accounts for stochastic rainfall and processes such as infiltration, root water uptake, water flow from/to an external water body, and capillar…
Comparative Analysis Between France and Italy
2016
In this chapter, the role of river contracts in European and national water policies has been analyzed, by observing the two paradigmatic contexts of France and Italy. The comparative analysis undertaken both with respect to the experiences of water management policies and river contracts, allows to more deeply assess the governance processes of water resources and understand their political, legal and socio economic scopes. In addition, the comparison of these two national contexts has highlighted the opportunities for actual integration between practices of urban and territorial planning, and water management policies. The analysis has been specifically focused on the respective normative…
Theoretics and Methodology
2016
Since 2000 in Europe an integrated management framework has been developed to innovate exploitation and safeguard of water resources. In this context the EU Water Framework Directive has identified the hydrographic basin as the optimal territorial unit for promoting new participatory policies, based both on the interaction of stakeholders and the coordination of sectorial instruments. In this scenario, river contracts assumed a strategic role both in addressing these purposes and supporting the dialogue and integration between interests of public and private stakeholders. This chapter illustrates the theoretical and methodological framework, and the comparative approach on which the researc…
On the influences of vegetation biomass on COSMO-Skymed X-band
2011
The knowledge of spatial and temporal variability of land cover is important to manage water resources for yield forecasting, water stress prediction, irrigation water management and flood protection. Cloud cover dramatically reduces the temporal resolution of optical data thus limiting their operational use; in addition, the spatial resolution is often inadequate for applications in heterogeneous areas. On the other hand, algorithms based on Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) implemented to retrieve vegetation parameters are not yet fully validated. New SAR missions (COSMO-Skymed and Terrasar-X) may represent a suitable source of data for operational uses due to the high spatial and temporal r…
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…