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Typifying cities to streamline the selection of relevant environmental sustainability indicators for urban water supply and sewage handling systems: a recommendation

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Abstract

Measuring performance and setting targets and benchmarks for the future entail the adoption of metrics or indicators. Sustainability is a multi-pronged objective encompassing social, economic, health, cultural, governance and environmental aspects. Indicators can be grouped under these categories. The selection of environmental sustainability indicators for a water and wastewater utility in a city needs to be based on concerns specific to the utility in question. The authors, in this paper, have recommended the classification of cities into city types based on specific attributes and identification of relevant environmental sustainability indicators, from a pool of 13 indicators, for these different city types. Having selected the relevant indicators, utilities can use them as tools to improve their environmental performance. The purpose is to not facilitate inter-utility comparisons within or across city types. Every utility would compare its environmental performance at a given point in time with what it was in the past. Towards the end, the paper also applies the methodology to nine cities across four continents—Europe (Oslo, Trondheim and Turin), Asia (the National Capital Territory of Delhi, Beijing, Tel Aviv and Male), North America (Sacramento) and South America (São Paulo). In all, 13 environmental sustainability indicators have been identified. Two cities—Oslo and Trondheim (both from Norway) belong to the same city type, while the other seven are different from each other in this regard. The number of relevant indicators ranged from 4 for Trondheim to 11 for Tel Aviv. The methodology is not restricted to urban water supply and sewage handling systems. It can be extended to other infrastructure systems as well—waste management, transportation, etc.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Helene Slagstad and Matthieu Vachon of NTNU for their inputs on Trondheim and Nantes, respectively. Thanks to Rashid Abdi Elmi and Ole Jakob Johnsen of Oslo Water and Wastewater Authority, Prof. Genon Guiseppe of the Polytechnic of Turin for his inputs on Turin (Italy), Tamar Opher of Technion, Tel Aviv, for inputs on Tel Aviv, Thomas Hendrickson for sharing information about cities in the USA (which have not been included in this paper though), Larry Dale of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California for his inputs on Sacramento, Prof. Arun Kansal of TERI, New Delhi, Mateus Ricardo of the University of Ijatuba, Brazil, Ahmed Mujthaba for his inputs on Male (Maldives), Dr Liang Pei of the Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, for the information about Beijing (and Gang Liu of NTNU, Trondheim for enabling me to contact Dr Liang). Thanks to the reviewers for their constructive comments which have helped to improve this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Hydraulic and Environmental Engineering, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, SP Andersensv 5, 7491, Trondheim, Norway

    G. Venkatesh & Helge Brattebø

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  1. G. Venkatesh
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  2. Helge Brattebø
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Correspondence to G. Venkatesh.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 3.

Table 3 City types, their attributes and suggested relevant environmental indicators
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Venkatesh, G., Brattebø, H. Typifying cities to streamline the selection of relevant environmental sustainability indicators for urban water supply and sewage handling systems: a recommendation. Environ Dev Sustain 15, 765–782 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-012-9405-1

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