Combined Sewer Overflow (CSO) infrastructure are conventionally designed based on historical climate data. Yet, variability in rainfall intensities and patterns caused by climate change have a significant impact on the performance of an urban drainage system. Although rainwater harvesting (RWH) is a potential solution to manage stormwater in urban areas, its benefits in mitigating the climate change impacts on combined sewer networks have not been assessed yet.
The sustainability of urban water systems is often compared in small numbers of cases selected as much for their familiarity as for their similarities and differences. Few studies examine large urban datasets to conduct comparisons that identify unexpected similarities and differences among urban water systems and problems. This research analyzed a dataset of 142 cities that includes annual per capita water use (m3/yr/cap) and population. It added a 0.5 ° grid annual water budget value (P-PET/yr) as an index of hydroclimatic water supply.
In the face of intensifying stresses such as climate change, rapid urban population growth, land use change, and public concern with rates and use restrictions, water management is becoming increasingly complex in the cities of the American West. One strategy to improve water management practices in this changing social-ecological context is to develop collaborative relationships that facilitate the engagement of multiple stakeholders at multiple scales.
Ensuring future water security requires broad community support for changes in policy, practice, and technology, such as those involved in delivering alternative water schemes. Building community support for alternative water sources may involve a suite of engagement activities, ranging from information campaigns, through to grassroots and participatory approaches. There is increasing recognition that ‘social capital’—the degree of social connectedness, trust, and shared values within a community—is important for building support for pro-environmental policies.
Overtourism' is likely to become a commonplace term over the next few years as the travel industry grapples with sustainable tourism. Addressing the issues faced will help to advance SDG 8.9 to devise and implement policies to promote sustainable tourism that create jobs and promote local culture and products as well as SDG 11.4 to strengthen efforts to protect and safeguard the world’s cultural and natural heritage.
Low-cost by-products from agricultural, household and industrial sectors have been recognized as a sustainable solution for wastewater treatment. They allow achieving the removal of pollutants from wastewater and at same time to contribute to the waste minimization, recovery and reuse. Despite numerous reviews have been published in the last few years, a direct comparison of data obtained using different sorbents is difficult nowadays because of inconsistencies in the data presentation.
Granite Powder (GP) and Iron Powder (IP) are industrial byproducts generated from the granite polishing and milling industry in powder form respectively. These byproducts are left largely unused and are hazardous materials to human health because they are airborne and can be easily inhaled. An experimental investigation has been carried out to explore the possibility of using the granite powder and iron powder as a partial replacement of sand in concrete. Twenty cubes and ten beams of concrete with GP and twenty cubes and ten beams of concrete with IP were prepared and tested.
On-site energy storage systems can be used in both domestic and commercial buildings to address the increasing demand on electricity. This would require energy to be purchased at off-peak times and stored for use during peak times. Despite a number of benefits to on-site energy storage systems, they are not yet an economically viable solution, although by 2021 costs are expected to fall significantly. Future-proofing buildings in the form of battery technology supports SDG 7 - affordable and clean energy.
In the US, land owners are liable for environmental impacts in relation to contaminated land. This Lexis Practice Advisor practice note explains what due diligence should be carried out in relation to the purchase of land/buildings to assess the environmental risk. Environmental due diligence advances SDG 3.9 to substantially reduce the number of deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals and air, water and soil pollution and contamination, and generally supports SDG 11 Sustainable cities and SDG 15 Life on land.
The rapidly growing and gigantic body of stored data in the building field, coupled with the need for data analysis, has generated an urgent need for powerful tools that can extract hidden but useful knowledge of building performance improvement from large data sets. As an emerging subfield of computer science, data mining technologies suit this need well and have been proposed for relevant knowledge discovery in the past several years. Aimed to highlight recent advances, this paper provides an overview of the studies undertaking the two main data mining tasks (i.e.
