<p>Sustainable water management is needed to ensure quality supplies of our vital water resources in the face of growing human demand for water, high levels of pollution, and increasing spatial and temporal variability associated with climate change. An integrated approach to water management is recommended to address current water challenges, which are often interrelated with other environmental, economic and social issues. Universities and colleges have missions, resources, and contexts that could enable them to lead the process of developing and applying sustainable and integrated water resource management (IWRM). The opportunity to exemplify integrated water management has grown as institutions of higher education have made progress towards incorporating environmental sustainability into teaching, research, and campus operations. This dissertation examines the issue of campus water management at institutions of higher education through a review of campus sustainability literature, a survey of sustainability and facilities managers, and case studies of three campus water-related projects. </p><p>Findings from the review of campus sustainability literature and websites suggests water is less of a campus management priority than issues such as energy and climate change; furthermore, where water is addressed, the focus is on water conservation, while water quality management is overlooked. IWRM is not explicitly discussed in the campus sustainability literature reviewed, though principles relevant to IWRM are included in some campus sustainability declarations and programs. Results from the survey substantiate the findings from literature review that water management is less of an institutional priority than energy management and water quality management is often underemphasized in campus management. According to the survey respondents, campus water management at the institutions represented was on average just adequately managed and institutions were minimally prepared to deal with several types of future water problems. Facilities managers tended to rate their institution's water management as slightly more effective compared to sustainability coordinators. Many campuses relied on top-down, engineering based water management approaches, rather than integrated and interdisciplinary water management. Individual initiatives, municipal codes and policies, campus community sustainability awareness, and campus environmental projects served as drivers for more sustainable water management, while budget constrains were a common barrier. Logistic regression analysis of the survey data revealed that institutions featuring stream and wetland restoration projects had greater odds of being described as having a developed watershed plan and taking into consideration multidisciplinary approaches to water management.</p><p>Case studies showed that wetland creation and restoration projects can serve as effective teaching and research laboratories for institutions of higher education, but that none of the studied cases fully exemplified IWRM in their operation. Of the three cases studied, the Stream and Wetland Assessment Management Park project at Duke University most closely demonstrated a campus project designed and developed to address water problems in the campus watershed, while also offering an effective outdoor teaching and research laboratory for hundreds of students, professionals, and researchers. The Olentangy River Wetland Research Park case at Ohio State University exemplified the potential for wetland creation and restoration projects to serve as a facility for educating thousands of students and visitors, training dozens of water experts, and influencing wetland and water resource management beyond the campus. The Radford University Stormwater Treatment Wetland Project case illustrated the potential for institutions with limited space and resources to establish effective outdoor teaching laboratories using environmental features already present or in development on campus. </p><p> Findings from the review, survey and case studies all point toward the need and opportunity for institutions of higher education to make greater efforts at implementing and promoting sustainable and integrated water resource management. Literature review and survey findings reveal that water is frequently overlooked as environmental resource at universities and colleges, while other environmental issues such as energy, climate change and recycling are prioritized in sustainability plans and efforts. Universities and colleges have made progress addressing water conservation, while water quality and stormwater need further attention and an integrated approach for more effective management.</p> / Dissertation

The purpose of this paper is to compare the differences between North American and European tertiary educational organizations regarding their expressed concerns about sustainable development within the transportation sector and their commitment to the research of issues related to sustainable transport. For this study, we created a list of academic organizations based on the compendium of papers from the Transportation Research Board¡¦s 2012 annual meeting. Then we analyzed the content from the public websites of these organizations to distinguish differences in the way universities in North America and Europe designed courses related to sustainable transport. After analyzing information from about 5,000 such courses, we found that most of them were worth 3 credits, more courses were offered for graduate students than for undergraduates, lecturing was the most common teaching method, the most commonly offered course was Transportation Engineering, and, on average, North American universities offered more sustainable transport courses than their European counterparts.

The planning and implementation of effective water resources management strategies need an assessment of multiple (physical, environmental, and socio-economic) issues, and often requires new research in which knowledge of diverse disciplines are combined in a unified methodological and operational framework. Such integrative research to link different knowledge domains faces several practical challenges. The complexities are further compounded by multiple actors frequently with conflicting interests and multiple uncertainties about the consequences of potential management decisions. This thesis aims to overcome some of these challenges, and to demonstrate how new modeling approaches can provide successful integrative water resources research. It focuses on the development of new integrated modeling approaches which allow integration of not only physical processes but also socio-economic and environmental issues and uncertainties inherent in water resources systems. To achieve this goal, two new approaches are developed in this thesis. At first, a Bayesian network (BN)-based decision support tool is developed to conceptualize hydrological and socio-economic interaction for supporting management decisions of coupled groundwater-agricultural systems. The method demonstrates the value of combining different commonly used integrated modeling approaches. Coupled component models are applied to simulate the nonlinearity and feedbacks of strongly interacting groundwater-agricultural hydrosystems. Afterwards, a BN is used to integrate the coupled component model results with empirical knowledge and stakeholder inputs. In the second part of this thesis, a fuzzy-stochastic multiple criteria decision analysis tool is developed to systematically quantify both probabilistic and fuzzy uncertainties associated with complex hydrosystems management. It integrates physical process-based models, fuzzy logic, expert involvement and stochastic simulation within a general framework. Subsequently, the proposed new approaches are applied to a water-scarce coastal arid region water management problem in northern Oman, where saltwater intrusion into a coastal aquifer due to excessive groundwater extraction for irrigated agriculture has affected the aquifer sustainability, endangering associated socio-economic conditions as well as traditional social structures. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods. The first method can aid in the impact assessment of alternative management interventions on sustainability of aquifer systems while accounting for economic (agriculture) and societal interests (employment in agricultural sector) in the study area. Results from the second method have provided key decision alternatives which can serve as a platform for negotiation and further exploration. In addition, this approach suits to systematically quantify both probabilistic and fuzzy uncertainties associated with the decision problem. The new approaches can be applied to address the complexities and uncertainties inherent in water resource systems to support management decisions, while serving as a platform for stakeholder participation.

This dissertation focuses on the economics of household water access in developing countries. The first paper explores whether improvements in water technology enable changes in household time allocation and, thereby, productivity gains. To do so, it exploits differences in timing of shared water tap construction across Kyrgyz villages. Households in villages that received the drinking water infrastructure are more likely to have water close to their homes. This reduced the time intensity of home production activities impacted by water. Village-level incidence of acute intestinal infections fell amongst children. Although adults show no signs of health improvements, they do benefit from reductions in the time spent caring for sick children. Individuals reallocate time savings to additional leisure and market labor, primarily work on the household farm, and the returns to the additional farm labor approximately equal the hourly farm wage. Time intensive water collection can be a source of gender inequality in households lacking water infrastructure. The second paper uses a natural experiment to investigate culture as a source of gender inequality and its role in determining gender roles for activities, such as water collection. Using exogenous variation in district-level cultural composition due to events in Kyrgyzstan during Soviet rule, I estimate the persistence of differences in gender equality between traditional sedentary farming cultures and nomadic herding cultures. Results indicate that Soviet institutions increased educational attainment in both cultures. Other cultural differences - such as gender of household water collector and perceptions of domestic violence - persist. One impediment to the construction of water infrastructure is insecure land tenure or property rights. The third paper explores whether alleviating this impediment through a program providing land titles in rural Peru is associated with improvements in water access. Utilizing the phased in timing, I exploit the differences in project implementation timing between households that held property titles prior to the project and those that did not. Results indicate that land titling is associated with increases in water access. Supporting evidence suggests that either the government or a utility might be responsible for the improvements.

<p>Natural steroidal estrogen hormones in swine wastes generated from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) have become a potential pollutant to many aquatic environments due to their adverse impacts on the reproductive biology of aquatic organisms. In North Carolina, the swine CAFO industry is a major agricultural economic enterprise that is responsible for the generation of large volumes of waste. However, there is limited scientific understanding regarding the concentration, fate, and transport of the estrogenic compounds from these swine facilities into terrestrial and aquatic environments. To address this issue, my research involved the development and application of integrated Bayesian networks (BNs) models that can be used to better characterize and assess the generation, fate, and transport of site-specific swine CAFO-derived estrogen compounds. The developed model can be used as decision support tool towards estrogen risk assessment. Modularized and melded BN approaches were used to capture the predictive and casual relationships of the estrogen budget and its movement within and between the three major systems of a swine farrowing CAFO. These systems include the animal barns, the anaerobic waste lagoon, and the spray fields. For the animal barn system, a facility-wide estrogen budget was developed to assess the operation-specific estrogen excretion, using an object-oriented BN (OOBN) approach. The developed OOBN model provides a means to estimate and predict estrogen fluxes from the whole swine facility in the context of both estrogen type and animal operating unit. It also accounts for the uncertainties in the data and in our understanding of the system. Next, mass balance melding BN models were developed to predict the natural estrogen fates and budgets in two lagoon compartments, the slurry and the sludge storage. This involved utilizing mass balance equations to account for the mechanisms of flushing, sorption, transformation, settling, and burial reactions of estrogen compounds in the slurry and sludge storages. As an alternative approach, a regression based BN melding approach was developed to both characterize estrogen fate and budgets as a result of the sequential transformation processes between natural estrogen compounds and to assess the seasonal effects on the estrogen budgets in the two different lagoon compartments. Finally, a dynamic BN model was developed to characterize rainfall-driven estrogen runoff processes from the spray fields. The dynamic BN models were used to assess the potential risk of estrogen runoff to adjacent waterways. In addition, the dynamic model was used to quantify the effects of manure application rates, rainfall frequency, the time of rainfall and irrigation, crop types, on-farm best management practices, seasonal variability, and successive rainfall and manure application events on estrogen runoff. </p><p>The model results indicate that the farrowing barn is the biggest contributor of total estrogen as compared to the breeding and gestation operating barns. Once the estrogen reaches the anaerobic lagoon, settling and burial reactions were shown to be the most significant factors influencing estrogen levels in the slurry and sludge, respectively. The estrogen budgets in the lagoon were also found to vary by season, with higher slurry and sludge estrogen levels in the spring as compared to the summer. The risk of estrogen runoff was predicted to be lower in the summer as compared to the spring, primarily due to the spray field crop management plans adopted. The results also indicated that Bermuda grass performed more favorably when compared to soybean, when it came to retaining surface water runoff in the field. Model predictions indicated that there is a low risk of estrogen runoff losses from the spray fields under multiple irrigation and rainfall events, unless the time interval between irrigation was less than 10 days and/or in the event of a prolonged high magnitude rainstorm event. Overall, the estrone was the most persistent form of natural estrogens in the three major systems of the swine farrowing CAFO.</p> / Dissertation

The principles of adaptive water governance blends many of the components of adaptive and comanagement, specifically iterative and social learning to foster adaptation and collective action. While many of the principles of adaptive water governance are still evolving, organizations operating within these contexts can be positioned as boundary or bridging agents concentrating on the science-policy interface or more centrally positioned to facilitate the inclusion and consideration of the multi-stakeholder perspectives at play. This thesis uses a comparative case study combined with a modified grounded theory approach to explore organizational governance arrangements and the roles played by three major water-focused non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in decision-making in British Columbia. An understanding of the challenges and supporting conditions that enhance organizational and actor efficacy within case study NGOs will inform the broader water community of opportunities for collaboration, capacity-building and expanding the roles of NGOs through provincial water governance reform.

Reservoir systems are subject to several uncertainties that are the result of imperfect knowledge about system behavior and inputs. A major source of uncertainty arises from the inability to predict future inflows. Fortunately, it is often possible to generate probabilistic forecasts of inflow volumes in the form of probability density functions or ensembles. These inflow forecasts can be coupled with stochastic management models to determine reservoir release policies and provide stakeholders with meaningful information of upcoming system responses such as reservoir levels, releases, flood damage risks, hydropower production, water supply withdrawals, water quality conditions, navigation opportunities, and environmental flows, among others. This information on anticipated system responses is also expressed in the form of forecasts that must reliably represent the actual system behavior when it eventually occurs. The first part of this study presents an assessment methodology that can be used to determine the consistency of ensemble forecasts through the use of relative frequency histograms and minimum spanning trees (MST). This methodology is then used to assess a management model's ability to produce reliable ensemble forecasts. It was found that neglecting to account for hydrologic state variables and improperly modeling the finite management horizon decrease ensemble consistency. Several extensions to the existing management model are also developed and evaluated. The second portion of this study involves the management of the uncertainties in reservoir systems. Traditional management models only find management policies that optimize the expected values of system benefits or costs, thereby not allowing operators and stakeholders to explicitly explore issues related to uncertainty and risk management. A technique that can be used to derive management policies that produce desired probabilistic distributions of reservoir system outputs reflecting stakeholder preferences is developed. This technique can be embedded in a user-interactive framework that can be employed to evaluate the trade-offs and build consensus in multi-objective and multi-stakeholder systems. The methods developed in this dissertation are illustrated in case studies of real reservoir systems, including a seven-reservoir, multi-objective system in California's Central Valley.

No description available.

<p>The aim of the study is to understand the level of co-operation between emerging and commercial farmers in a Water User Associations. The effort is expected to inform policy and improve practice in the building of new water institutions as government strives to implement IWRM.</p>

<p>Following South Africa's independence from apartheid rule, there has been progressive developments in policies that promote equity in all spheres including the water sector. Equality in the water sector is not only limited to water access, but also management of the water. This study investigated the factors that empower women in the water sector as an example of gender equity.</p>