Water and sanitation
In a changing climate, providing a stable water supply may become a challenge. In any case, many cities extract huge quantities of water from the environment, and factoring the embedded water of imported products into account makes most cities have vastly unsustainable water footprints. How do we change this?
Topics to investigate include:
- What does an average city's water footprint look like? How much of the water footprint comes from embedded (virtual) water? How much of it is caused by the local industry, and how much by residential consumption?
- Can we create a (nearly) closed loop urban water cycle? If not, what would prevent us from doing so?
- Existing water infrastructure is non-compostable. Can this be changed? Can water be safely stored and transported using biomass instead of steel, cement or other types of material?
- Is decentralized water supply an option? What would be needed for this?
- And what about decentralized water treatment? Filtration ponds and wetlands could provide some of these services, while also helping provide other ecosystem services. Are these an option in an urban context?
Ideas and resources
We are looking for ideas and resources in the field of Water and sanitation that may enable a city to adhere to the Triple 95 rule. Please help out!
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Discussion
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