Abstract
With the 2030Agenda for Sustainable Development, the United Nations have established a catalog of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all by 2030. One important aspect, formulated as Goal 6, is ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all. Achieving SDG 6 represents a chal-lenge for planning, governance, and water management, especially in prosperous water-scarce regions, where water demand rises steadily and outgrows sustainable supply.Over a 3,5-year period, the joint project TRUST (“Sustainable, fair and environmentally sound drinking water supply for prosperous regions with water shortage: Developing solutions and plan-ning tools for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals using the river catchments of the region Lima/Peru as an example”) has developed inter- and transdisciplinary concepts for drin-king water use, safe wastewater disposal and water reuse to support achieving SDG 6 in water scarce regions, using the example of the catchment area of the Río Lurín, Peru. This report presents the approaches and results developed in the TRUST project. The approaches combine natural, engineering and social science expertise from research and practice, starting at the local level and scaled up to the level of catchment areas. They are structured along the do-mains of “water resources”, “water use” and “water management”. The domains are closely inter-linked and support working towards the development of integrated water management concepts. Each of these domains begins with the set-up of an information base, followed by the conduction of analysis and the development of concepts. It concludes with the derivation of lessons learned and recommendations for each of the domains. Generating a sound multidisciplinary information base is key for water resources planning and conduction of analysis. Installing a small number of monitoring stations at the right locations allows to get important insights on water quantity. Establishing and maintaining a monitoring network for water quantity is a challenging task in remote and mountainous areas, requiring long-term efforts and commitment. However, long time series are important to run hydrological models and even more if trends regarding climate change or land use change are to be considered in management decisions. Evaluating water quality and associated risks still requires conventio-nal lab analyses, both physical-chemical and microbiological. Test kits that allow simple water analyses to be carried out by specifically trained local actors can provide an additional means to acquire water quality data. Remote sensing techniques can be applied for the classification of land use, the detection of land cover changes, and the estimation of soil moisture. They provide a basis for methodological solutions by establishing a land cover change detection approach with deep learning methods on multi-temporal satellite data. A newly developed decision support system based on the WHO Water Safety Plan concept (WSP) enables the recording and evaluation of risks in the catchment area as well as the documentation of measures for risk control. As an online application with Web-GIS geodata processing, it is usa-ble for users without own GIS access. The tool visualizes the results quickly, thereby supporting the communication about the aims of risk analysis and helping to achieve a common understan-ding of which information is relevant.
Regarding governance issues and conflict analysis, stakeholder analysis is important to obtain an overview on roles and relations. It allows to develop a participation strategy that identifies whom to involve during what project activity and in what intensity. Repeated field trips and interviews with key actors are required to achieve a full understanding and detailed overview of the of stakeholders’ positions regarding the project’s goals, and of the interrelations between stakeholder groups.The newly developed policy- and conflict analysis allows identifying central (latent) water use related conflicts as well as developing and assessing possible integrated policy-solutions for an improved and sustainable water management. The approach makes diverging goals and policy alternatives of different water user groups explicit. It reveals how non-intended side-effects of policies affect the effectiveness of other policies and allows identifying consistent, synergetic and sustainable policy mixes. For the development of integrated concepts for water supply and sanitation, an inter- and trans-disciplinary process, where scientists, water and sanitation engineers, social scientists as well as local actors and stakeholders collaborate closely, proves to be very helpful. Participatory assess-ment allows identifying the evaluation criteria that are relevant for local stakeholders and taking them into account in the further development of the concepts. Bringing actors from the upper and lower catchment together in joint multi-stakeholder workshops leads to more dialogue and fosters cooperation between catchment parts. Overall, the integrated approach allows to take the social-embeddedness of technological concepts into account and to co-construct concepts together with local stakeholders. Furthermore, involving stakeholders with different perspectives still requires ensuring the same level of information and knowledge. Stakeholders need to be enabled and empowered regularly to participate in the integrated planning processes – to this end, capacity building workshops are valuable. Using SDG 6 as a point of reference assured that our results are linkable to international debates and standards through the comparability of indicators.Central conditions to transfer our integrated approaches include the active interest of stakehol-ders, a continuous and/or repeated collaboration between local actors, researchers and NGOs, as well as sufficient data, a common problem awareness, and comparable boundary conditions (regarding, e.g., hydrology, geochemistry, sociology, culture, education, urban water manage-ment, etc.). Local contexts, however, can be very specific, so the approaches need to be carefully contextualized.
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