Accurate information of urban surface water is important for assessing the role it plays in urban ecosystem services under the content of urbanization and climate change. However, high-resolution monitoring of urban water bodies using remote sensing remains a challenge because of the limitation of previous water indices and the dark building shadow effect. To address this problem, we proposed a...

This paper proposes a technique to extract urban built-up land features from Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) and Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM ) imagery taking two cities in southeastern China as examples. The study selected three indices, Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI), Modified Normalized Difference Water Index (MNDWI), and Soil Adjusted Vegetation Index (SAVI) to represent thr...

The present study develops an integrated methodology combining the results of the water-quality classification, according to the Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC-WFD, with those of a mathematical integrity model. It is able to analyse the potential anthropogenic impacts on the receiving water body and to help municipal decision-makers when selecting short/medium/long-term strategic mitigati...

ion, and the like. The science of climate change and its impacts is very uncertain, though this does not distinguish it from the science of water and sanitation. A more obvious distinction is that whereas progress on water and sanitation is often inhibited by a tendency to turn to outdated models of improvement, progress on adaptation to climate change is inhibited by the lack of models to turn...

Many environmental challenges are exacerbated within the urban landscape, such as stormwater runoff and flood risk, chemical and particulate pollution of urban air, soil and water, the urban heat island, and summer heat waves. Urban trees, and the urban forest as a whole, can be managed to have an impact on the urban water, heat, carbon and pollution cycles. However, there is an increasing need...

When urban areas expand without concomitant increases in wastewater treatment capacity, vast quantities of wastewater are released to surface waters with little or no treatment. Downstream of many urban areas are large areas of irrigated croplands reliant on these same surface water sources. Case studies document the widespread use of untreated wastewater in irrigated agriculture, but due to th...

There is the need to re-configure current urban water systems to achieve the objective of sustainable water sensitive cities. Stormwater represents a valuable alternative urban water source to reduce pressure on fresh water resources, and to mitigate the environmental impact of urban stormwater runoff. The selection of suitable urban stormwater harvesting sites is generally based on the judgeme...

Sustainable urbanization is a challenge to human beings in the modern era of technology. Cities all over the world are facing several problems due to urbanization and industrialization. Urban problems could be assessed through development of indices of urban sustainability on the basis of its three dimensions: environment, economics and social. The present study was conducted to identify indica...

Water vendors, selling water door-to-door from donkey carts, are an important source of domestic supply in low-income urban areas in Sudan, as in other developing countries. A study of the demand for this service showed that it was of negligible elasticity, with no evidence of direct control of the price by a monopoly or cartel. It follows that the price of water paid by the poor could be great...