Is our urban water system still sustainable? A simple statistical test with complexity science insight
Section snippets
Monitoring urban water sustainability amid uncertainty
One of the greatest challenges of this century is to secure enough fresh water for the world's increasing population (Harlan et al., 2009) of which 55% live in urban areas (United Nations, 2018). Sustainable urban water management seeks to overcome this challenge and preserve water resources for future generations through local source diversification (e.g. rainwater harvest), and fresh water demand reduction via efficient use and reuse (Marlow et al., 2013; Tortajada, 2020). Its effectiveness
Theoretical and methodological framework
A system may be defined as a set of components which interact in a regular, interdependent manner to meet particular goals (Jain and Singh, 2003). We build systems like urban water, transportation and healthcare to enable self-organization of complex supporting, provisioning and regulating services. Normality of these systems means that they continue to self-organize towards their original goals such as water sustainability (Scheffer et al., 2009). Monitoring normality is fundamental to
Background
Located in central Iran, Yazd Province is inhabited by over 1,300,000 people of which more than 80% are urban. Yazd is the driest center of urban population north of the Persian Gulf coast with a yearly precipitation amount of 49 mm and only 23 days of precipitation. However, Yazd's urbanization dates back to the Sasanian Empire before the arrival of Islam in the mid seventh century AD. Known as ‘City of Windcatchers’ and ‘City of Qanats’, Yazd has been praised by international scholars and
Conclusions
This study searched for new ways of monitoring sustainability that acknowledge emergence in complex systems whereby something mysterious happens when things come together (Cilliers et al., 2013). Such new ways should therefore address our limitation in monitoring system outputs such as wastewater speculation which can be viewed as both normal and non-normal with different assumptions about its long term function in water sustainability.
I proposed an alternative methodology for monitoring urban
Credit author statement
Abbas Ziafati Bafarasat: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Roles/Writing - original draft; Writing – review & editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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