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This paper explores the physical, social, and environmental dimensions of how climate change impacts affect drinking water safety in a rural context in developing countries. Climate impacts, such as contamination or the reduced availability of preferred drinking water sources due to climate-related hazards, threaten water safety in rural areas and these impacts will likely worsen as climate change accelerates. We qualitatively examined these impacts in a community in rural Vanuatu using three approaches side-by-side: adaptation, vulnerability, and resilience. We employed a mixed methods case study methodology that combined semi-structured interviews, technological and environmental surveys, and observations. We demonstrate the influence of physical infrastructure design, social structures mediating water access, and the availability of multiple sustainable water resources on water safety with respect to climate impacts. We also show how the initial problematization of how climate affects water safety can influence subsequent actions to address, or overlook, issues of infrastructure design and maintenance, social equity, and natural resource management for water access. Improvements to rural drinking water safety management in the context of climate change should take a pluralistic approach, informed by different conceptualizations of climate impacts, to account for the varied causal pathways of reduced water safety for different members of a community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Over the past decades, the cost-effectiveness principle or a cost–benefit analysis has typically been employed as an assessment tool for the expansion of drinking water utilities. With changing public awareness of the inherent linkages between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the addition of this new consideration in the assessment regime has altered the landscape of the traditional evaluation matrix. This paper presents a comparative evaluation based on a suite of carbon footprint and cost data associated with 20 expansion alternatives for a systematic priority analysis of a drinking water infrastructure system in South Florida. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Many countries have applied many measures, including preventing inappropriate activities in areas where drinking water is abstracted to protect drinking water resources. However, reaching good water quality based on human health has not been achieved in drinking water basins. Drinking‐Water Protected Areas Determination has been defined as a powerful protection method to restrict inappropriate activities affecting water quality and quantity. These areas are determined based on basin properties to provide sustainable drinking water management. This study aims to present a framework for drinking water protection by giving methodological study steps. Strengths, deficiencies and inadequacies in drinking water protection practices were shown by examining the implementations of Turkey and European Union member countries. Thus, by adding new methods to these applications, a standard approach was created to be applied to each different drinking water basin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban communities around the world are grappling with the challenges associated with population increases, drought, and projected water shortages. With a substantial global shortfall between water supply and demand expected by 2030, water planning strategies must adapt to a new reality characterized by higher temperatures and less precipitation, requiring new ways of thinking about water management, use, and governance. Commonplace strategies such as water conservation and nonpotable water reuse might not be sufficient to adequately stretch water supplies in water‐scarce parts of the industrialized world. In the United States, planned potable water reuse (i.e., purification of domestic wastewater for reuse as drinking water) is emerging as a way forward to mitigate water shortages without significant changes to lifestyle, behavior, or infrastructure. But potable reuse is not the only solution: paradigm shifting and disruptive options that more holistically address water scarcity, such as composting toilets and market‐based approaches to water use, are also gaining traction, and they could be pursued alongside or instead of potable water reuse. However, these options would require more significant changes to lifestyles, behavior, infrastructure, and governance. While all of the options considered offer advantages, they each come with new concerns and challenges related to cost, public perception, social norms, and policy. The goal of this work is to consider a number of plausible solutions to water scarcity—partial and complete, traditional and disruptive—to stimulate forward‐looking thinking about the increasingly common global problem of water scarcity. This article is categorized under:Engineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of WaterEngineering Water > Planning Water [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is critical to understand the ability of water management to prepare for and respond to the likely increasing duration, frequency, and intensity of droughts brought about by climate variability and change. This article evaluates this ability, or adaptive capacity, within large urban community water systems (CWSs) in Arizona and Georgia. It analyzes interview data on the bridges and barriers to adapting water management approaches in relation to extreme droughts over the past decade. This study not only finds levers for building adaptive capacity that are unique to each state but also identifies several unifying themes that cut across both cases. The interviews also show that a particular bridge or barrier, such as state regulation, is not universally beneficial or detrimental for building adaptive capacity within each state. Such knowledge is useful for improving water and drought management and for understanding how CWSs might prepare for future climate variability and change by removing the barriers and bolstering the bridges in efforts to build adaptive capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on planning-related topics which include an examination of the popularity of dancing in New Zealand during the 1920s and 1930s, an examination of how religious diversity in community affects church membership in a period of high growth and social change and an examination of child labor in urban industries in the Dutch Republic.