The Complexity Of Urban Water Resources Management

In addition, research revealed that urban areas who shared sources also had higher levels of infrastructure and management complexity. When assessing 3) costs within the urban water complexity paradigm, results indicated that water provision processes scale across urban utility population size with economies of scale. Using a combined metric to measure total operational complexity of each utility, results showed that in general, the level of complexity was higher than expected, and that higher complexity was correlated to higher overall costs. When utilities were assessed for their 5) level of collaborative participation, results indicated that over the past five years, collaborative participation has risen within urban utilities, and has coincided with a shift away from supply-based management towards a more balanced use of supply- and demand-based management strategies as well as an increase in the importance utilities place on water management plans. Finally, 6) when urban water complexity was examined over time, distinct patterns and trends emerged between disparate case studies. Similar threads of complexity are thought to run though all urban water management systems.