Natalia Uribe Calvo
Leiden University - Faculty of Science - Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML)
Bachelor's Degree in Civil Engineering and in Environmental Engineering from Los Andes University in Bogotá D.C., Colombia with a Master's Degree in Industrial Ecology from Leiden University and Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. Currently living in Bogotá D.C., her work experience and research focus is on integrated solutions for a sustainable built environment; as well as planning and management of sustainable construction projects. Interest in community work, social change, and education.
This research is an attempt to contribute to the understanding of urban water systems through the use of the urban metabolism (UM) framework. By developing steady-state models with STAN, a software used for material flow analysis (MFA), the urban water flows are quantified and analyzed as they enter the system boundary, are transformed by anthropogenic processes within the system, and then leave the urban area.
Such a model has been applied to a specific urban water system in the town of Palomino, Colombia. The area under study corresponds to a system boundary of 4.83 km2, and the analysis was performed for the year 2015. A detailed examination of Palomino’s water system was established based on primary data collection through survey processes, mapping, and semi-structured interviews. Based on the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of the water system; a conceptual urban water metabolism (UWM) model was created to identify the critical flows of the water system through a monthly (31-day) analysis based on fourteen (14)scenarios, each including four variables: Touristic season, Hours without electricity per month, Percentage of water losses due to pipelines leaks, and Percentage of water losses due to user’s behavior.
Finally, the potential of the sustainable water supply technique of rainwater harvesting to influence the current UWM of Palomino was assessed by identifying metabolic changes in the UWM for three key years: 1969, a year of extreme rainfall; 1997, a year of El Niño phenomenon characterized by extreme drought, and 1987, a year of‘standard’ precipitation. The analysis was based on a critical scenario with the highest water losses and water demand. The rainwater harvesting collection capacity was determined by a storage capacity of 2000 L per household, while taking into account water consumption (water demand) per household between rain events on a monthly basis analysis. This condition implied that, even though the analysis was based on steady-state modeling, a semi-dynamic analysis was performed based on the variations of the stored rainwater volume (∆V) between the time intervals determined by the rain events per month (∆t).
One of the most significant results is that the applied methodology proved to be successful in terms of understanding urban water systems—not by the traditional approach of modeling based on average values, but rather by using scenarios that provide a deeper understanding of the rhythms, patterns, variations and dynamics of urban water flows in water systems. The changes in the UWM are then understood by the use of signals (e.g. positive and negative values) to determine the metabolic changes and water needs of the urban system. This methodology could be applied in a larger context, especially in developing countries that have limited data to undertake a statistical analysis.
Keywords: Urban Metabolism (UM), Urban Water Metabolism (UWM), Material Flow Analysis (MFA), Data poor locations, Colombia, Industrial Ecology.
• Industrial ecology in developing countries , • Socio-economic metabolism and material flow analysis , • Decision support methods and tools
