Sustainability Assessment of Urban Water Supply and Distribution Systems: A Case Study

Despite some shortcomings in their performance, urban water supply and distribution systems have provided urban dwellers with water for years; nevertheless, there have been widespread criticisms of these systems functionality since the introduction of sustainable development concept in the late 1980s. Nowadays, many experts believe that not only should these systems be evaluated based on their ability to provide conventional services in short term horizons, but also they should be assessed based on their ability to preserve water resources for the future generations in long-term perspectives. Most of the decisions made about the selection of urban water development projects in Iran are merely based on economic criteria: therefore, environmental and social criteria don’t have significant roles in decision making. Hence, there is a need to apply methods which can assess the urban water development projects based on the main objectives of sustainable development such as preserving the balance of water supply and demand, preventing permanent environmental damages and satisfying the consumers’ needs (especially the future generations’ needs). In this paper, different components of an implemented sustainability assessment study for a given urban water supply and distribution system in Tehran, the capital city of Iran are introduced. The proposed criteria and indicators cover the economic, social, environmental and technical aspects of sustainability. Furthermore, Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) method is selected as the sustainability assessment method which is a conventional Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) method. The objectives of the case study are the assessment of relative sustainability scores of different urban water supply and distribution systems alternatives and ranking them. The alternatives are proposed based on three different approaches comprising the modification of water tariffs, water quality cascading and water reuse. The preliminary results of the case study are also presented in this work. In the forthcoming research works, the final results of the case study will be published.

کلیدواژه ها:

Urban water supply and distribution systems ، Sustainability assessment ، Water reuse ، The modification of water tariffs ، Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP)