Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of South Florida, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33620, USA.
School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Oklahoma, 202 W. Boyd St., Norman, OK 73019, USA.
Sci Total Environ. 2020 Apr 20;714:136685. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.136685. Epub 2020 Jan 15.
Coastal communities and their wastewater treatment systems are vulnerable to the impacts of extreme events. Decision-making about transitioning critical infrastructure across scale - onsite, community, or centralized - to an improved treatment portfolio is complex as it couples financial, social, policy, technological, and environmental factors with impacts to public health and aquatic ecosystems. In this paper, we propose a system dynamics approach to consider important factors and dynamics that influence municipalities' decision-making process for wastewater infrastructure transitions in the Florida Keys, particularly considering some impacts of a changing climate. Our research utilizes social-technical transition theories to develop an adaptable and dynamic decision-making tool for transitioning to an improved portfolio of wastewater technologies and to determine strategies that improve the portfolio's performance measures (i.e. nutrient loading and reliability) under extreme weather scenarios. The initial simulation results demonstrate that it is important to incorporate the impacts from extreme events into the wastewater infrastructure decision-making process because they increased nutrient loading by >20% and decreased reliability by nearly 10%. With this climate-informed decision-making structure, strategies were developed to facilitate the transition to an improved wastewater treatment portfolio. The strategies include a new socio-economic decision-making approach, technology and economic policies, and socio-technical behavior change. The socio-technical strategy simulated widespread adoption of urine diversion technologies which made the greatest improvement to nutrient loading with an 81% decrease. Furthermore, the best approach to improve the reliability performance measure (from 81% to 83%) was the technology and economic policy which economically disincentivized investment in centralized wastewater systems and changed the community-level technology option.
沿海社区及其废水处理系统容易受到极端事件的影响。在现场、社区或集中式层面上，将关键基础设施过渡到改进的处理方案，这一决策涉及财务、社会、政策、技术和环境因素，以及对公共卫生和水生生态系统的影响，因此非常复杂。在本文中，我们提出了一种系统动力学方法来考虑影响佛罗里达群岛市政当局废水基础设施过渡决策过程的重要因素和动态因素，特别是考虑到气候变化的一些影响。我们的研究利用社会技术转型理论来开发一种适应性强且动态的决策工具，以实现向改进的废水技术组合的过渡，并确定在极端天气情景下提高组合绩效指标（即营养负荷和可靠性）的策略。初步模拟结果表明，将极端事件的影响纳入废水基础设施决策过程非常重要，因为它们使营养负荷增加了>20%，可靠性降低了近 10%。通过这种具有气候意识的决策结构，制定了促进向改进的废水处理方案过渡的策略。这些策略包括新的社会经济决策方法、技术和经济政策以及社会技术行为改变。社会技术策略模拟了尿液分流技术的广泛采用，这使得营养负荷最大减少了 81%。此外，提高可靠性绩效指标（从 81%提高到 83%）的最佳方法是技术和经济政策，该政策从经济上抑制了对集中式废水系统的投资，并改变了社区层面的技术选择。
