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....