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The Colorado River supplies >40 million people in the United States Southwest with their daily water supply and is unable to meet the current demands. New approaches are needed to enhance sustainability and resilience. A net zero urban water (NZUW) approach meets the needs of a given community with a locally available and sustainable water supply, without detriment to interconnected systems and the long-term water supply. Transitioning to a NZUW future will require considerable modifications to governance and policy across the Southwest and its cities specifically. We identify five areas of governance and policy challenges: diversified water sources and sinks; planning, design, and operation; monitoring and enforcement; coordination; and addressing equity and justice. Four case study cities are investigated: Albuquerque, Denver, Los Angeles, and Tucson. Across these cities, the policy priorities include supporting potable water reuse, coordinating policies across jurisdictions for alternative water sources, addressing equity and justice, developing and incentivizing water conservation plans, and making aquifer storage and recovery projects easier and more economical to pursue. We conclude that a NZUW transition in the Southwest faces considerable governance and policy challenges, but moving cities toward this goal is crucial.
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An approach to designing sustainable urban infrastructure
This article offers a conceptual understanding and easily applicable guidelines for sustainable urban infrastructure design by focusing on the demand for and supply of the services provided by seven urban infrastructure systems. For more than 10,000 years, cities have evolved continuously, often shaped by the challenges they had to face. Similarly, we can imagine that cities will have to evolve again in the future to address their current challenges. Specifically, urban infrastructure will need to adapt and use less energy and fewer resources while becoming more resilient. In this article, starting with a definition of sustainability, two urban infrastructure sustainability principles (SP) are introduced: (i) controlling the demand and (ii) increasing the supply within reason, which are then applied to seven urban infrastructure systems: water, electricity, district heating and cooling and natural gas, telecommunications, transport, solid waste, and buildings. From these principles, a four-step urban infrastructure design (UID) process is compiled that can be applied to any infrastructure project: (i) controlling the demand to reduce the need for new infrastructure, (ii) integrating a needed service within the current infrastructure, (iii) making new infrastructure multifunctional to provide for other infrastructure systems, and (iv) designing for specific interdependencies and decentralizing infrastructure if possible. Overall, by first recognizing that urban infrastructure systems are inherently integrated and interdependent, this article offers several strategies and guidelines to help design sustainable urban infrastructure systems.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1646395
- PAR ID:
- 10113513
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- MRS Energy & Sustainability
- Volume:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 2329-2229
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1557/mre.2018.14
