IWA Science Summit for Urban Water

主题:IWA Science Summit for Urban Water 时间:July 13-17, 2014 地点:Harbin, China Significance of this summit: Recently, the urban water environment problems in world became extremely complicated due to the rapid urbanization and large population, which has become one of the critical bottle-necks restricting the sustainable development of cities. In the past, cities were designed by scraping off the local ecologic systems and replacing them with mostly hardscape and some green space occupied by non-native species. Along the way, we essentially followed the Romanesque design for urban water systems, i.e., big-pipe thinking, in which big pipes supply water to cities and carry out wastewater and stormwater from those cities. While big-pipe thinking has served our urban centers very well in the past, this water management system and water treatment technologies evolved when the energy and water resources were abundant. However, the population of the world increased by more than 3.75 times from 20th to 21st century, which has resulted in limited water resources, and increased use of fossil fuels for energy production. During this difficult period where global economies are struggling, population growth is continuing to increase, formerly predictable water resource conditions are changing, and energy costs for supplying and treating drinking water and wastewater are rising, communities are facing tremendous challenges to meet the growing water demand in an affordable way. This calls for a substantial change in the design of urban water systems, in general, and water infrastructure and its interactions with other urban systems, in particular. Hence, advanced and innovative technologies on water treatment, water body remediation, resource and energy recovery from waste materials has become urban demands. There is an additional issue, [...]