Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Engineering (ORISE), National Risk Management Research Laboratory, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 26 West Martin Luther King Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45268, USA.
Soller Environmental, 312 NE 82nd St., Seattle, WA 98115, USA.
Water Res. 2015 Jun 15;77:155-169. doi: 10.1016/j.watres.2015.03.017. Epub 2015 Mar 25.
Planning for sustainable community water systems requires a comprehensive understanding and assessment of the integrated source-drinking-wastewater systems over their life-cycles. Although traditional life cycle assessment and similar tools (e.g. footprints and emergy) have been applied to elements of these water services (i.e. water resources, drinking water, stormwater or wastewater treatment alone), we argue for the importance of developing and combining the system-based tools and metrics in order to holistically evaluate the complete water service system based on the concept of integrated resource management. We analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of key system-based tools and metrics, and discuss future directions to identify more sustainable municipal water services. Such efforts may include the need for novel metrics that address system adaptability to future changes and infrastructure robustness. Caution is also necessary when coupling fundamentally different tools so to avoid misunderstanding and consequently misleading decision-making.
规划可持续的社区水系统需要全面了解和评估整个生命周期中的综合水源-饮用水-废水系统。尽管传统的生命周期评估和类似的工具（例如足迹和能值）已应用于这些水服务的各个方面（即水资源、饮用水、单独的雨水或废水处理），但我们认为重要的是开发和结合基于系统的工具和指标，以便根据综合资源管理的概念全面评估完整的水服务系统。我们分析了关键基于系统的工具和指标的优缺点，并讨论了未来的发展方向，以确定更可持续的城市水服务。这些努力可能包括需要新的指标来解决系统对未来变化和基础设施稳健性的适应性。在耦合根本不同的工具时也需要谨慎，以避免误解并最终导致误导决策。
