WATEF Blog Archive

Cape Town’s water crisis is now big news globally, though it has been exercising the minds of the four million city dwellers since this time last year. As I write this blog 'Day Zero' is now July 9th (a grace period of almost three months since the beginning of February when it was estimated to be mid-April) and still too close for comfort. Day Zero is when the water level in the ....

Demand for water and the capacity of infrastructure systems to meet it varies widely in cities across the world. In cities with growing populations and finite water resources, reducing per capita consumption of water is an obvious strategy for making existing water resources serve more people. As readers of this blog well know, managing demand for water is far from simple. Reliable access to clean....

It seems that everyone in the UK has an opinion on leakage from public water supply systems – usually that it is ‘wasteful’, ‘too high’; or ‘more should be done’ – but how does perception compare with reality? Is this ‘group-think’ or is it based on logical analysis of factual data, using international ‘fit for purpose’....

A leaky loo doesn’t sound very nice. Is it foul water leaking? Where is leaking, onto the floor? Luckily that’s not what we are talking about but ‘leaky loos’ are easily misunderstood. So just to clarify, in this blog we are talking about toilets leaking clean water from the cistern into the bowl, often just a barely visible trickle down the toilet pan causing some rippl....

This project is sponsored by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF) and the blog below was written by the project’s Masters by Research student, Mitchell McTough and landscape architect Simon Watkins on visits to various refugee camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). When camps are set up, bearing in mind these are associated with situations of crisis and offer displaced people somewh....

Clean water, access to sanitation, and an understanding of good hygiene practices are essential for the survival and development of children. So who better to empower to tackle local and global water issues than young people themselves?
As the leaders of tomorrow, young people are going to be key to achieving the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals, including Goal 6 – acce....

n the UK it is an offence to supply water unfit for human consumption under Section 70 of the Water Industry Act (1991) and similar legislation applies in Germany. Water supplied to buildings must be pure and suitable for drinking purposes without any health risks, containing neither pathogens nor other substances in health-damaging concentrations. To meet this legislation water suppliers deliver ....

Over many years of giving introductions to economics to water specialists, I learnt that the best way of discouraging them from zoning out was to start by asking how many of them disagreed with at least one of the following statements:

• Astrology offers greater intellectual rigour than economics.
• Accountancy provides greater intellectual excitement than economics.

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