Climate change presents a major threat to water and sanitation services. There is an urgent need to understand and improve resilience, particularly in rural communities and small towns in low- and middle-income countries that already struggle to provide universal access to services and face increasing threats from climate change. To date, there is a lack of a simple framework to assess the resilience of water and sanitation services which hinders the development of strategies to improve services. An interdisciplinary team of engineers and environmental and social scientists were brought together to investigate the development of a resilience measurement framework for use in low- and middle-income countries. Six domains of interest were identified based on a literature review, expert opinion, and limited field assessments in two countries. A scoring system using a Likert scale is proposed to assess the resilience of services and allow analysis at local and national levels to support improvements in individual supplies, identifying systematic faults, and support prioritisation for action. This is a simple, multi-dimensional framework for assessing the resilience of rural and small-town water and sanitation services in LMICs. The framework is being further tested in Nepal and Ethiopia and future results will be reported on its application.
A water safety plan for the city of Nagpur was developed by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI) and Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC). Possible hazards were identified through field visits. Based on this, an improvement plan was drawn up to suggest corrective actions and a time frame for implementation. The findings of this study are being used to modify or repair components of the water supply system and upgrade management procedures. This paper highlights the lessons learnt during implementation of the WSP and the key challenges faced.
Batch kinetic tests and continuous-flow column experiments were conducted to study fluoride adsorption on porous hydroxyapatite ceramics. Batch tests showed that fluoride uptake occurred faster for smaller adsorbent particles, which is expected for ceramics with internal sorption sites. Columns with different flow rates had different breakthrough curves. Fluoride loading on the adsorbent (q) at point of exhaustion (C eff = 0.85 C 0) increased with decrease in flow rate, while the mass loading at breakthrough (C eff = 0.15 C 0) stayed nearly constant. Flow interruption at different points led to a temporary decrease in the effluent fluoride concentration demonstrating that the columns experienced nonequilibrium conditions, and intraparticle diffusion played a significant role in fluoride uptake. The Rapid Small-Scale Column Test (RSSCT) concept was tested as a scaleup approach. Small-scale columns were designed using the constant diffusivity (CD) and proportional diffusivity RSSCT approaches, with CD found to be the more suitable approach to predict the breakthrough of a large-scale column. This serves to further validate the use of porous hydroxyapatite ceramics for fluoride uptake and provides insights into the design of full-scale systems.
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