Resilience theory incorporated into urban wastewater systems management. State of the art

Abstract

Government bodies, utilities, practitioners, and researchers have growing interest in the incorporation of resilience into wastewater management. Since resilience is a multidisciplinary term, it is important to review what has been achieved in the wastewater sector, and describe the future research directions for the forthcoming years. This work presents a critical review of studies that deal with resilience in the wastewater treatment sector, with a special focus on understanding how they addressed the key elements for assessing resilience, such as stressors, system properties, metrics and interventions to increase resilience. The results showed that only 17 peer-reviewed papers and 6 relevant reports, a small subset of the work in wastewater research, directly addressed resilience. The lack of consensus in the definition of resilience, and the elements of a resilience assessment, is hindering the implementation of resilience in wastewater management. To date, no framework for resilience assessment is complete, comprehensive or directly applicable to practitioners; current examples are lacking key elements (e.g. a comprehensive study of stressors, properties and metrics, examples of cases study, ability to benchmark interventions or connectivity with broader frameworks). Furthermore, resilience is seen as an additional cost or extra effort, instead of a means to overcome project uncertainty that could unlock new opportunities for investment.