WATEF Blog Archive

Valencia, a city located on the south-east coast of Spain, is the country’s third largest city after Madrid and Barcelona with 800,000 inhabitants in the administrative centre. It is at the forefront of water saving initiatives with its smart metering programme and intelligent irrigation systems for the huertas (farmland) surrounding the city; as such it was this year’s WATEF study t....

In the famous Catalan fairy story ‚‘The Water of Life‘, also known by its original name ‘El agua de la vida’, only the deliverance of the water of life, sourced from a magic spring in the hills, can save a family from being turned to stone by an evil giant. It is the daughter of the family who outsmarts the ogre and restores life with the water. The life of her own f....

What do you see if you look at water that has just entered a drain or sewer? Well, if it’s just come from a toilet that’s been flushed (known as foul water) it will look like water (i.e. clear). It might have loo roll in it (possibly variable colours though mostly white) or poo, and if the user hasn't heard of the three P's rule (i.e. only poo paper or pee) then maybe a wet....

It has been shown that that citizens are motivated to participate in the improvement and maintenance of civic landscapes when these latter contribute to the quality of life of the people living in proximity. There is also convincing evidence that cultural ecosystem services can be aesthetic and spiritual and that people respond to landscape beauty and scale with admiration and respect. Landscape ....

How do we value water?

We cannot live without water, but because it is so much part of our everyday exist-ence it has become invisible to us. We need to understand and acknowledge its im-portance to modern lifestyles and to start to value the role it plays in all our lives.

Natural capital
But how do we value a resource that is ‘invisible’? The fact that it is so mak....