Speaker
Description
Water scarcity is one of the major environmental issues with increasing impacts on human life and economic development. Due to the growing discharge and diversity of industrial pollutions, water quality degradation and ineffective regional water allocation have been identified as important causes of water scarcity. Regional water scarcity becomes a host of complex issues related to the availability of water with sufficient quality rather than just an insufficient water quantity. Water scarcity assessment (WSA) is of great significance to quantify the extent of the scarcity and provide insightful information to facilitate scarcity minimization. The up-to-date development of the WSA methodology should also be able to consider the scarcity in terms of water quantity and quality, as well as the complicity of regional water allocation and management.
In order to establish the state-of-the-art and identify the future directions of research and development in the area of water scarcity assessment and minimisation, this paper presents a review of the major water scarcity assessment methods developed and implemented within the recent 10 years (2008-2018).
The metrics and consideration of water quality of selected WSA methods are reviewed. These methods are divided into 3 categories including Single Value Indicating (SVI) method, Direct Ratio-based (DR) method and Fuzzy Comprehensive Evaluation (FCE) method. The potential directions of WSA methodology are discussed. Major findings of the review include i) there is an urgent need to include the contribution of water quality in WSA; ii) across-regional water distribution should be considered in future studies, and iii) Pinch Analysis (PA) is of great potential as a graphical tool for WSA.
Acknowledgment
The EU supported project Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory – SPIL funded as project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000456, by Czech Republic Operational Programme Research and Development, Education, Priority 1: Strengthening capacity for quality research in the collaboration agreement with the Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) based on the SPIL project have been gratefully acknowledged.
| Position of speaker | Junior Researcher |
|---|---|
| Affiliation of speaker | Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory – SPIL, NETME Centre, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Brno University of Technology, Czech Republic |
| Publication | Journal of Cleaner Production |
