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Sustainability assessment of water resource systems using a novel hydro-socio-economic index (HSEI)

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Abstract

Sustainable management of water resources is an essential process for securing Earth’s present and future generation life. This study offers development of a new comprehensive framework and index for socio-economic evaluation of water resource systems. The hydro-socio-economic index (HSEI) is made of several economic, demographic, technology and communication, and health and sanitation factors at different temporal and spatial scales. The major foci of this research are estimation of HSEI and the analysis of their socio-economic situation of those European countries with increasing renewable water per capita during 1998–2017 periods. The HSEI values for all of the studied European countries range from 0.480 to 0.521 based on the single and combined methods. According to the qualitative classification, the index values are classified in good level for all fourteen countries. The results show that the increase in renewable water per capita influences socio-economic parameters in those countries. The result of this study will further support future investigation of selecting underlying factors that can be used as a criterion for the future planning and decision-making processes to form sustainable policies.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Iran’s National Science Foundation (INSF) for its financial support of this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Irrigation and Reclamation Engineering, Faculty of Agriculture Engineering And Technology, College of Agriculture and Natural Resources, University of Tehran, Karaj, Alborz, Iran

    Sarvin ZamanZad-Ghavidel & Omid Bozorg-Haddad

  2. National Science Foundation (INSF), Tehran, Iran

    Sarvin ZamanZad-Ghavidel

  3. Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering and Computing, University of South Carolina, 300 Main St. Room C113B, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Erfan Goharian

Authors
  1. Sarvin ZamanZad-Ghavidel
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  2. Omid Bozorg-Haddad
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  3. Erfan Goharian
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Correspondence to Omid Bozorg-Haddad.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 and Figs. 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16.

Fig. 12
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Correlation of socio-economic and RWPC parameters

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Fig. 13
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Convergence curve of the GEP models

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Fig. 14
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Values of HSEI in European continent with different aspects by country using the single linear (SL) method

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Values of HSEI in European continent with different aspects by country using the combined soft computing (CSC) method

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Fig. 16
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HSEI value of demographic, technology and communication, and health and sanitation aspects and annual scale by country, using SL and CSC methods

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ZamanZad-Ghavidel, S., Bozorg-Haddad, O. & Goharian, E. Sustainability assessment of water resource systems using a novel hydro-socio-economic index (HSEI). Environ Dev Sustain 23, 1869–1916 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-020-00655-8

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