Literature Review: Water Sustainability

Matson, P. (2009). The sustainability transition. Issues in Science and Technology, 25(4), 39-42.

One of the biggest challenges, which humanity will face in the 21st-century concerns sustainability. Humanity will have to understand how to meet the ground requirements of all people for nutriment, energy, and water. It should be achieved without demeaning the basic physical and organizational structures of our planet, including the atmosphere, climate, ecosystems, water resources, flora, and fauna. The article shows that to tackle that question effectively, institutions, both academic and governmental, should push for a consent effort to integrate science and technology into a new field called sustainability science. The author believes that the field of sustainability science is not outlined by disciplines but rather by issues, which should be governed and resolved. Thus, it incorporates and is grounded on foundations of the biophysics and societal sciences, engineering, and physics, together with the humane studies, and is frequently a multi and interdisciplinary in an effort. Therefore, to be accomplished efficiently, the field is now in need of a well-thought plan that engages the broad research spectrum to generate interconnected outcomes between diverse institutions. The work is reliable, supported by the research plan and a vivid demonstration of possible institutional changes. The article is highly useful for the research paper, as it provides the data on institutional barriers, which is a key concept of the current research.

Wood, W. (2005). Water sustainability – Science or management? Groundwater, 29(5), 641-647.

The research conducted by the author is focused on the expanse and repercussions on water resources around the globe. The latter is likely to occur because of the redoubling of the population in the following 100 years. The article is reliable being supported by numerous policy alternatives approachable to addressing different water connected issues. Some of them concern maintaining or reducing of the general population; encouraging or mandating of the water conservation; investing and relying on new technological breakthroughs. All approaches are directed towards cleaning off the wastewater and providing low-priced energy sources for terminus and dissemination. The article is highly important for the research paper as it provides information on the concept of sustainable science, which appears among the major issues discussed in the research.

Sala, L, & Serra, M. (2004). Towards sustainability in water recycling. Water Science Technology, 50(2), 1-8.

The authors demonstrate that projected wastewater reformation and re-usage is typically emphasized as a crucial step towards sustainability in water resource management. Nevertheless, these notions are seldom properly analyzed. The paper discusses such issues as the major objectives in water reuse and impacts on water demands. It provides an ecological analysis of the course of the major pollutants, taking into account the majority of the health facets and treatment necessities, including energy consumption perspectives and calculable environmental benefits. The article is reliable as the information provided is supported by an assortment of norms in the evaluation of the notion of sustainability in water recycling designs. It is also supported by the examples of reducing the influence of the tillable watercourse on the environment. The study is important for the current research paper because it will be used to demonstrate the issues of sustainability.

Gleick, P. (1990). Water in crisis: Paths to sustainable water use. Ecological Applications, 8(3), 571-579.

The article demonstrates that a broad variety of ecological and humane calamities result from inappropriate accession to freshwater resources. The author stresses that due to the fact that human populations increase the issues mentioned above are distinctly possible to become more serious in the future. Thus, the author claims that new approaches to long-range water projecting and management, which encompass grounds of sustainability and impartiality are necessary and are currently being investigated by national and multinational water adepts and institutions. The study is reliable, being supported by the demonstration of seven sustainability criteria as an element of an attempt to reformulate long-range water projecting and management on a global scale. The article is crucial for the research, as it demonstrates a new positive future vision of the global water resources, named as ‘Backcasting’, as an implement for evolving reasonable policies and approaches for resolving water connected issues.

Brown, R. (2008). Local institutional development and organizational change for advancing sustainable urban water futures. Environmental Management, 41(2), 221-233.

The article demonstrates the outcomes of five-year ongoing research concentrated on ascending the realization of sustainable urban water management in Australia, one of the global leaders in sustainable operations. The research paper depicts the idea of a stagnancy connected with executive systems and bureaucratic infrastructure. The latter is an essential barrier to ascending innovative policies of sustainability concerning various areas of Austria. The author demonstrates a typology of five organizational expansion stadiums, which is suggested to become a benchmarking implement for individual practitioners and local/state government program designers. They can be used to enhance the level of local realization of sustainable urban water management operations. The findings of this research are reliable. In addition, they equip benchmarks for evaluation of the development requirements of future competence building projects across a variety of different institutional contexts on a global scale. The article is highly useful for the research paper as it provides the data on institutional barriers, which is a key concept of the current research.

Carter, R., Tyrrel, S., & Howsam, P. (1999). Impact and sustainability of community water supply and sanitation programs in developing countries. Journal of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management, 13, 292-296.

The authors believe that all-round strategies for community water supply and sanitation projects in developing countries have be grounded on a distinct comprehension of each exceptional existent geographical issue, the rewarding influences approachable by the region, and the agents, which define sustainability itself. Carter, Tyrrel, and Howsam believe that various institutional and economic agents undermine sustainability in the context of the continuous provision of effective services. Thus, community participation approaches alone are no guarantee of success. The article is reliable and supported by the information regarding the direct human consequences on the environment demonstrated through actual numbers and figures. The paper is highly important to the research as it provides the new norms of program purposes and aims in connection to influence and sustainability of water resources, which can be utilized in program design, control, and analysis.

O’Connor, G., Elliot, H., & Bastian, R. (2008). Degraded water reuse: An overview. Journal of Environmental Quality, 37, 157-168.

The article demonstrates that communities around the globe encounter progressively fresh water supply scarcities as the result of greatly enlarging populations, the related food stock, economic evolvement, and health issues. The authors concluded that international reuse of degraded waters (including wastewater drainages, irrigation round currents, storm-water, and grey-water) as a substitution for fresh waters could be a solution to the challenges mentioned above. Thus, the potentiality for degraded water re-usage is immense. However, essential hurdles in a form of institutional restrictions impede its extensive adoption. The information in the study is reliable, supported by numerous figures, numbers, estimations, and reuse kinds of comparisons. The article is significant for the research as it demonstrates a variety of different degraded water kinds and reuses possibilities, together with its restrictions and limitations of their utilization, which will be included in the research topic “Issues of Sustainability.”

Massoud, M., Tarhini, A., & Nasr, J. (2009). Decentralized approaches to wastewater treatment and management: Applicability in developing countries. Journal of Environmental Management, 90, 652–659.

The authors demonstrate that it is highly challenging to providing well-founded and accessible wastewater treatment in rural areas in different parts of the world, especially in developing countries. Amalgamated wastewater gathering and treatment systems are expensive to construct and manage, particularly in the locations with low population concentrations and diffused households. The developing countries face a shortage in both the fund dedicated to the construction of the centralized facilities and the technical practice to control and manage them. The article demonstrates that a decentralized system can become the best option for such developing countries because of its dependability and cost efficiency. The authors demonstrate that management strategies should be location-specific taking into account social, cultural, environmental and economic circumstances in the targeted locations. The paper is reliable, supported by the review of the different decentralized approaches to wastewater management together with an extensive discussion of their applicability in developing countries. The article will be helpful for the research paper, as it provides information for the research topic “Sanitation/Health Conditions in the Developing Countries.”

Haanaes, K., Michael, D., Jurgens, J., & Rangan, S. (2013). Making sustainability profitable. Harvard Business Review.

Developing countries/economies are frequently depicted as sustainability stragglers because people believe that they are more concentrated on combating poverty than on saving their environments. The article demonstrates that executives of the mentioned regions are weak and indecisive while imposing limitations on the newly liberalized markets with sustainable regulations, which creates the institutional hurdle. The study is reliable and demonstrates that in order to make the environmental attempts repay, it is significant to follow one or more of three major approaches to sustainability. The first approach asks for greater primary depositions in more costly methods of sustainable management, which leads to higher revenues in the short run. The second approach starts with the minor alterations to operations that result in cost savings, which are later utilized to deposit in new technologies. The third approach involves the dissemination of sustainability management to all possible supply chain members. The paper is important to the current research because the approaches presented will be used in the chapters “Sanitation/Health Conditions in the Developing Countries” and “Issues of Sustainability.”

Silva, A., & Silva, C. (2014). Environmental planning for hydrographics basins: Convergences and challenges in Capibaribe River Basin, in Pernambuco-Brazil. Holos, 30(1), 20-40.

This research was developed with the intent to analyze the realization of public policies in the conduct of water supply in Pernambuco in Brazil, especially in the Capibaribe Hydrographic Basin. The authors used the qualitative method and case study methodology for this research to analyze whether the operations help create sustainability of the analyzed basin or not. The article is reliable and supported by the research results, which demonstrate that the amalgamation of the environmental projecting concerning the water management in Pernambuco requires a more devoted execution of the State, combined with elevated complicity of ordinate civil society. The paper is important to the current research as it provides detailed information on the realization of the public policies. The findings of the article will be included in the chapter “Issues of Sustainability.”

Azeredo, C., Cotta, R., Schott, M., Maia, T., & Marques, E. (2007). Assessment of sanitation and housing conditions: The importance of home visits in the family health program context in Brazil. Ciencia & Saude Coletiva, 12(3), 743-753.

The cognizance of health connected environmental circumstance, including the quintessence sanitation and residence, has an enormous significance for the formulation of measures created to enhance the caliber of life at the personal, family, and community levels. This paper evaluates families taking part in the Family Health Program and provides a transversal observational analysis to the evaluation of this government program. Its semi-structured inventory was applied to ten percent of the families taking part in the program. In addition, the study demonstrates significant examples depicting the inadequate dispensation of the sanitation structures and facilities between urban and rural regions of Brazil.

Teixeira, J., & Guilhermino, R. (2006). Analysis of association between sanitation and health in the Brazilian States, using secondary data from data bank “Indicadores e Dados Basicos Para a Saude.” Engenharia Sanitaria e Ambiental, 11(3), 277-282.

The study presented in the article analyzes the connections between the sanitation levels and the epidemiologic indications in the Brazilian states. The data utilized in the study has been provided by the Brazilian Ministry of Health. The research compares three different types of sanitation. The first type concerns the population covered by the water supply system. The second one regards the population covered by sewage disposal. The third type concerns the population covered by domestic garbage collection services. The article is reliable and supported by the results, which have been contrasted to the infant mortality ratio, proportionate mortality ratio in regards with acute diarrhea (children under five years of age), and proportionate mortality ratio in a connection to contagious and parasitical ailments for all ages. The information is significant for the research and will be included in the chapter “Sanitary/Health Conditions in the Developing Countries.”

Roy, S., & Ricci, P. (2005). Evaluation of the sustainability of water withdrawals in the United States, 1995 to 2251. Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 1, 1091-1108.

The authors conducted a country-level analysis of the accessibility of renewable water resources the immensity of human withdraws from surface water and groundwater sources. Their aim was to estimate the long-range sustainability of water abolitions in the U.S. The authors later utilized the estimates of enlargement in population and electricity generation to evaluate the alteration in withdrawals suspecting that either the ratios of water usage sustain at the present levels or they demonstrate enhancements in the effectiveness at the analogous ratio observed between 1975 and 1995. This analysis shows the regions of possible water sustainability apprehensiveness. Thus, it allows making them subjects to more targeted data gathering and analysis in the future by the government and non-governmental establishments. The information is reliable, supported by numerous figures and important evaluations. The article is crucial for the research as the information presented will be used as a basis for the chapter “Sewage and Water Withdrawals.”.

Lang, D., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M., Stauffacher, M., Martens, P., Moll, P., Swilling, M., & Thomas, C. (2012). Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: Practice, principles, and challenges. Sustainability Science, 7, 25-43.

The authors state that people begin to understand that sustainability challenges ask for innovative methods of information outturn and decision-making. The authors demonstrate that the incorporation of outside academia agents can become a crucial aspect of sustainability science. Such a step can help in the integration of the best accessible data, reconciliation of values and preferences, together with the creation of the ownership for various issues and resolution options. The authors suggest that transdisciplinary and community-grounded research approaches are relevant means to meet both the necessities created by real-life issues and the objectives of sustainability science, which appear in a form of an innovative transformational scientific sphere. The article is reliable because it synthesizes and formulates a specific number of principles from various sources and empiric researches. The study is important as the data will be used as a basis for the research topic “The Concept of Sustainable Science.”

Pahl-Wostl, C., Mostert, E., & Tabara, D. (2008). The growing importance of social learning in water resources management and sustainability science. Ecology & Society, 13(1), 24-28.

The authors address the significance of the content and course of alteration for social learning. The article contributes to the standard and normative debate concerning sustainability learning. It provides a theoretic, academic, and integration structure, which intends to underlie the major constituent and interconnections of what learning is necessary for societal learning in order for it to transform into sustainability learning. The work is reliable and based on European Water Commission investigations. The article is highly important to the current research as its findings and information will be used as a basis for the research topic “The Concept of Sustainable Science.”

Komiyama, H., & Takeuchi, K. (2006). Sustainability science: Building a new discipline. Sustainability Science, 1, 1-6.

The authors demonstrate that the global scientific and academic circles understand that the possibility of developing the rising discipline of sustainability science has never been bigger than currently. Thus, the article demonstrates that the concept of sustainability science is typically outlined as a discipline, which demonstrates and guides the way towards a sustainable society. The authors except from addressing such problems as, for instance, inter-generational equity (which is important to the sustainable development), demonstrate the importance of approaching the issue of sustainability at three levels, including global, social, and human. The paper is reliable and indispensable as it vividly demonstrates that the systems are significant for the co-existence of people and the environment. The article is helpful for the current research as it defined the concept of sustainability science. Moreover, the study helps demonstrate that it should also educate and create a new generation of leaders who can appreciate the importance of alterations in global, social, and human systems as well as select the path of sustainability in executing policies.

Ioris, A., Hunter, C., Walker, S. (2008). The development and application of water management sustainability indicators in Brazil and Scotland. Journal of Environmental Management, 88, 1190-1201.

This article demonstrates the creation and utilization of infrastructure of drainage-level water resource management indications projected to amalgamate exogenous, economic, and societal elements of sustainability. Thus, the authors applied a nine-indications framework in order to analyze the River Dee and the Sinos River drainage in Scotland and Brazil. This framework helps investigate numerous significant sustainability concerns. This is a major reason why it is extensively welcomed by water resource managers and adepts, as it is an essential mean of enhanced cognizance of sustainable water resource management. The problems connected to bad water caliber and public water supply are especially visible in a case of the Sinos River, at the same time when the results for the river Dee demonstrate that more attention should be concentrated on the creation of institutional capability and public part-taking in drainage management. This research is dependable and demonstrates the indicator framework, which can help with the enhanced integration of environmental, economic, and societal dimensions of sustainability. The paper will be used in the current research while demonstrating the topic “Issues of Sustainability.”

Niemeier, D., Gombachika H., & Richards-Kortum, R. (2014). How to transform the practice of engineering to meet global health needs. Science, 345, 1287-1290.

More of the global population has the ability to buy a mobile phone than to use fundamental sanitation facilities. The authors demonstrate that this issue can be resolved only when engineering and international communities use new approaches to designing for deficit and magnitude. The authors suggest a transition to frugal design, which makes a basis for strategies to create a next-generation toilet. The latter will not only merely operate waste but also agglomerate water and energy resources. The design will require a new type of infrastructure, which will be financially sustainable. The research is reliable, demonstrating the different option of design suitable for various purposes. The article will be used in the current research while demonstrating that engineering and multinational communities should utilize approaches, which will enhance the global health for it to be sustained.

Strande, L., Ronteltap, M., & Brdjanovic, D. (2014). Fecal waste: The next sanitation challenge. Water 21, 16-18.

The authors demonstrate that numerous parts of the world, especially developing countries, have a serious requirement for the management of fecal residue from local sanitation systems. It can have solid consequent influences on human health and the environment itself. The development of appropriate fecal residue management can lead to better sanitation for billions of people worldwide. Therefore, fecal residue management is essential to the future development of global sanitation. The paper is reliable and presents a systematic approach to the above-mentioned type of management. The research is highly important to the current research paper as it can be used as a basis for the demonstration that low- and middle-income countries typically do not have a management system in place for the resulting fecal sludge.

Mehrotra, K. (2014). India’s toilet race failing as villages don’t use them. Bloomberg.

The article proves that Indians have serious problems because of the toilet shortage, which leads to one of the biggest sanitation problems as diarrhea. However, construction of toilets will not solve the problem as people should be explained and taught about the value of sanitation. The country suffers from institutional barriers, which impede the process and do not dedicate the costs of solving the immense problem. The article is reliable being supported by solid facts and figures of government failures. The paper is highly important to the current research as it can be used to demonstrate not only the health/sanitation conditions in the developing countries (one of the most crucial topics of the research) but also the problem of institutional barriers.