Over the past 20 years, water quality in Indonesia has deteriorated due to an increase of water pollution. Research and analysis is needed to identify pollution sources and assess contamination in Indonesian water resources. Water quality management is not yet sufficiently integrated in river basin management in Indonesia, which mainly focuses on water quantity. Women are comparatively highly impacted by failing water resources management, but theirinvolvement in decision making processes is limited. Water quality deterioration continues to increase socio-economic inequality, as it are the most poor communities who live on and along the river. The uneven water quality related disease burden in Brantas River Basin widens the socio-economic gap between societal groups. In the Brantas region, cooperation and intention between stakeholders to tackle these issues is growing, but is fragile as well due to overlapping institutional mandates, poor status of water quality monitoring networks, and limited commitment of industries to treat their waste water streams. The existing group of Indonesian change makers will be supported by this project. Three Indonesian and three Dutch organisations have teamed up to support negotiation platforms in order to deal with institutional challenges, to increase water quality monitoring capacity, to build an enabling environment facilitating sustainable industrial change, and to develop an enabling environment in support of community concerns and civil society initiatives. The project builds on integrated water quality monitoring and modelling within a framework of social learning. The strong consortium will be able to build links with civil society groups (including women, farmer and fisher unions) in close cooperation with local, regional and national Indonesian governmentinstitutions to clean the Brantas river and secure income and health for East Java’s population, in particular the most vulnerable groups.
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Lebanon’s economic crisis has disrupted the country’s energy and water sectors, highlighting their interdependence. The methodologyinvolves surveying 150 municipalities across all Lebanese governorates, ensuring a comprehensive coverage of public and private waterresources. Data on water and energy were collected before and during the crisis to explore this nexus during periods of economic turmoil.The findings reveal a decline in water provision during the crisis, with the average weekly water supply plummeting from 49 h in 2019 to 22 hin 2023. Concurrently, the use of water tankers has surged from 26 to 44%, indicating a concerning shift in water acquisition methods.Despite the crisis, conventional water sources remain predominant, while unconventional sources account for less than 1% of the totalsupply. In response to the energy shortage, renewable energy sources have gained traction in residential, commercial, and industrial sectors.The scarcity and rising cost of electricity have driven the adoption of solar photovoltaics in the water sector, reaching 4.8% for extraction fromunderground reservoirs and 2.8% for distribution. Similarly, the use of solar water heaters has increased from 7.9 to 15.4% in 2023. Thesefindings underscore the interplay between energy and water security during periods of economic instability.
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In recent years, a step change has been seen in the rate of adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies by manufacturers and industrial organizations alike. This article discusses the current state of the art in the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies within the construction industry. Increasing complexity in onsite construction projects coupled with the need for higher productivity is leading to increased interest in the potential use of Industry 4.0 technologies. This article discusses the relevance of the following key Industry 4.0 technologies to construction: data analytics and artificial intelligence, robotics and automation, building information management, sensors and wearables, digital twin, and industrial connectivity. Industrial connectivity is a key aspect as it ensures that all Industry 4.0 technologies are interconnected allowing the full benefits to be realized. This article also presents a research agenda for the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies within the construction sector, a three-phase use of intelligent assets from the point of manufacture up to after build, and a four-staged R&D process for the implementation of smart wearables in a digital enhanced construction site.
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The Zhanghe irrigation system (ZIS) is located in the Yangtze River Basin approximately 200 km west of Wuhan in Hubei Province. The reservoir was designed for multiple uses—irrigation, flood control, domestic water supply, industrial use, aquaculture, and hydropower. Over a period of more than 30 years a steadily increasing amount of water has been transferred from irrigation to other uses. Activities on the part of government, irrigation system managers, and farmers made this transfer possible with only modest decline in rice production. Most important factor was the steady increase in rice yields. The water pricing system provided an incentive for ZIS to reduce irrigation releases. With the steady decline in releases, farmers were forced to find ways to save water. Farmers improved existing ponds and built new ones to store water (improved infrastructure). Access to pond water on demand facilitated the adoption of alternate wetting and drying (technology) particularly in dry years. The establishment of volumetric pricing (price policy) and water user associations (institutions) may also have provided incentives for adoption of AWD, but more research is needed to establish their impact. These activities taken together can be seen as potentially complementary measures. Farmers received no direct compensation for the transfer of water, but recently farm taxes have been reduced or altogether abolished. Further reduction in water releases from the ZIS reservoir could adversely affect rice production in normal or dry years.
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The importance of water and energy accessibility and use has become more important as new insight into their role for sustainable development goals has become mainstream. The inclusion of water and energy in strategic decision-making is thus key. Supply chain network design (SCND) in the food industry is an interesting case study for the incorporation of water and energy utilization during the design process of global production systems. In the current green SCND research, frequently, single indicators are used such as carbon emissions to measure environmental impact. This paper presents a case study applied to an orange juice supply chain, formulated as a multi-objective optimization model. A single environmental impact indicator optimization approach is paired against one that includes water and energy use explicitly in the objective function set. Mixed conclusions are shown from the results pairing the two strategies side by side.
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PowerPoint presentation used during a lecture of Peter van der Maas, professor Sustainable Water Systems at Van Hall Larenstein, on October 8, 2019 at the Wetsus Congress 2019 in Leeuwarden.
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The Dutch greenhouse horticulture industry is characterized by world leadership in high-tech innovation. The dynamics of this playing field are innovation in production systems and automation, reduction in energy consumption and sharing limited space. However, international competitive advantage of the industry is under pressure and sustainable growth of individual enterprises is no longer a certainty. The sector's ambition is to innovate better and grow faster than the competition in the rest of the world. Realizing this ambition requires strengthening the knowledge base, stimulating entrepreneurship, innovation (not just technological, but especially business process innovation). It also requires educating and professionalizing people. However, knowledge transfer in this industry is often fragmented and innovation through horizontal and vertical collaboration throughout the value chain is limited. This paper focuses on the question: how can the grower and the supplier in the greenhouse horticulture chain gain competitive advantage through radical product and process innovation. The challenge lies in time- to-market, in customer relationship, in developing new product/market combinations and in innovative entrepreneurship. In this paper an innovation and entrepreneurial educational and research programme is introduced. The programme aims at strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration between enterprise, education and research. Using best practice examples, the paper illustrates how companies can realize growth and improve the innovative capacity of the organization as well as the individual by linking economic and social sustainability. The paper continues to show how participants of the program develop competencies by means of going through a learning cycle of single-loop, double-loop and triple loop learning: reduction of mistakes, change towards new concepts and improvement of the ability to learn. Finally, the paper illustrates the importance of combining enterprise, education and research in regional networks, with examples from the greenhouse horticulture sector. These networks generate economic growth and international competitiveness by acting as business accelerators.
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The Dutch greenhouse horticultural industry is characterized by world leadership in high-tech innovation. The dynamics of this playing field are innovation in production systems and automation, reduction in energy consumption and sharing limited space. However, international competitive advantage of the industry is under pressure and sustainable growth of individual enterprises is no longer a certainty. The sector's ambition is to innovate better and grow faster than the competition in the rest of the world. Realizing this ambition requires strengthening the knowledge base, stimulating entrepreneurship, innovation (not just technological, but especially business process innovation). It also requires educating and professionalizing people. However, knowledge transfer in this industry is often fragmented and innovation through collaboration takes up a mere 25-30% of the opportunities. The greenhouse horticulture sector is generally characterized by small scale, often family run businesses. Growers often depend on the Dutch auction system for their revenues and suppliers operate mainly independently. Horizontal and vertical collaboration throughout the value chain is limited. This paper focuses on the question: how can the grower and the supplier in the greenhouse horticulture chain gain competitive advantage through radical product and process innovation. The challenge lies in time- to-market, in customer relationship, in developing new product/market combinations and in innovative entrepreneurship. In this paper an innovation and entrepreneurial educational and research programme is introduced. The programme aims at strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration between enterprise, education and research. Using best practice examples, the paper illustrates how companies can realize growth and improve innovative capabilities of the organization as well as the individual by linking economic and social sustainability. The paper continues to show how participants of the programme develop competencies by means of going through a learning cycle of single-loop, double-loop and triple loop learning: reduction of mistakes, change towards new concepts and improvement of the ability to learn. Furthermore, the paper discusses our four-year programme, whose objectives are trying to eliminate interventions that stimulate the innovative capabilities of SME's in this sector and develop instruments that are beneficial to organizations and individual entrepreneurs and help them make the step from vision to action, and from incremental to radical innovation. Finally, the paper illustrates the importance of combining enterprise, education and research in networks with a regional, national and international scope, with examples from the greenhouse horticulture sector. These networks generate economic regional and national growth and international competitiveness by acting as business accelerators.
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How can the grower and the supplier in the greenhouse horticulture industry gain competitive advantage through radical innovation? The challenge lies in time- to-market, in customer relationship, in developing new product/market combinations and in innovative entrepreneurship. Realizing this ambition requires strengthening the knowledge base, stimulating innovation, entrepreneurship and education. It also requires professionalizing people. In this paper an innovation and entrepreneurial educational and research programme is introduced. This KITE120-programme aims at strengthening multidisciplinary collaboration between enterprise, education and research. It helps making the step from ambition to action, and from incremental to radical innovation. We call this an 'Amazing Jump'.
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Both climate change and human activity are the important drivers that can change hydrological cycle routs and affect the features of hydrological drought in river basins. The current study selects the Zayandeh Rud river Basin as a case study region in which to evaluate the influences of climate alteration and human activity on meteorological and hydrological drought based on the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Standardized Runoff Index (SRI) on different time scales. The generated local climatic data of future years (2006–2040), (2041–2075) and (2076–2100) under the severest scenario (RCP 8.5) from the CMIP5 climate model are selected and used for the hydrology model and water allocation model of WEAP to construct hydrological drought which also consider human activities. The results indicate that significant meteorological drought is expected to occur in the winter and spring months of January to June. However, the driest month for hydrological drought is in the summer and autumn (July to December) (e.g. no changes in seasonality of droughts compared to historic period). It is concluded that, in the results of this work, the human influences on projected hydrological drought have been outlined; they had been missed in many projections for future hydrological drought. However, this study confirms the previous study (Bierkens et al. 2012) which mentioned that human influences can account for future hydrological drought in areas of Asia, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The results attained in this study are beneficial for examining how hydrological drought characterizations respond to climate alteration and human activity on several time scales, thereby providing scientific information for drought predicting and water resources management over various time scales under non-stationary circumstances.
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