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Abstract Water-scarce regions, like the Mediterranean, face worsening conditions due to climate change, intensifying pressure on key economic sectors such as hydropower. Additionally, environmental conservation policies, particularly the implementation of environmental flows, present challenges for hydropower systems. Certainty regarding the impact of these factors on future hydropower production is crucial for informed decision-making in the transition to sustainable energy. This study introduces S + HydPower, a tool coupled with SWAT+ to assess climate change and watershed management effects on small hydropower plant (SHP) systems. In this study, we used this tool to investigate the consequences of implementing environmental flows and climate change on run-of-river SHPs in the Catalan River Basin District (CRBD), in Catalonia. The results show that applying environmental flows would lead to a significant 27% reduction in SHP production. However, this reduction would represent only 0.25% of the region’s current energy demand. Furthermore, the study reveals a potential 38% to 73% reduction in SHP production by the end of the twenty-first century due to the combined effects of environmental flows and climate change. This suggests a substantial decline in run-of-river SHP’s contribution to the CRBD’s electricity supply. These findings emphasize the need to explore alternative and sustainable energy sources to ensure the long-term reliability and resilience of the region’s energy supply.

Nature-based solutions are increasingly used in domestic wastewater treatment, because of their potential to remove contaminants and pathogens from water (e.g., stormwater, river water, wastewater) as well as their provided co-benefits, such as mitigation of the heat island effect or enhanced biodiversity. The transition from traditional grey technologies towards nature-based solutions in domestic wastewater treatment might yield multiple benefits for local communities while enhancing biodiversity. Although some nature-based solutions such as treatment wetlands have been used for decades in domestic wastewater treatment, this is not the case for others such as green walls or roofs, which lack implementation guidelines and design criteria. Aiming to support implementation of nature-based solutions in domestic wastewater treatment, we have developed an online decision-support system for the pre-selection of the best nature-based solution to use in each socio-environmental context and adapted to the needs, as well as an estimate of the required area. Our decision-support system's recommendations are based on an expert knowledge-driven approach, building on two complementary expert knowledge elicitation workshops. We hope the developed online decision-support system will support the transition towards integrating nature-based solutions into urban water and wastewater treatment systems. HIGHLIGHTS We lack implementation guidelines and design criteria for nature-based solutions (NBS) in water sanitation.; We have developed an online decision-support system to facilitate NBS implementation.; NBS implementation in domestic wastewater treatment will support SDG6 achievement.;

Serious games have been proposed by several studies as a tool to foster civic participatory processes. However, such an endeavour is often prone to failure due to lack of funding or lack of skills on designing serious games. In response to this problem, this paper provides a novel framework for the design of serious games for participatory planning of nature-based solutions, which provides guidance for the definition, content, and evaluation steps. The usefulness of the framework is illustrated with the design of the Edible City Game (ECG), a digital serious game for participatory planning of edible city solutions (urban nature-based solutions with a food component). The designed ECG was then implemented in Tygron, a platform which provides a graphical interface for serious games for urban planning. However, although Tygron provides a user-friendly software to design serious games, our thesis is that the final product still needs a proper design-orientated process to fulfil its purpose. We believe that this framework, as well as our experience using the Tygron platform, can be of great utility to both researchers and practitioners that have considered using serious games in their projects but discarded the idea because of the foreseen resource intensity of the endeavour.

Although we have extensive datasets on the location and typology of industries, we do not know much on their generated and discharged wastewater. This lack of information compromises the achievement of the sustainable development goals focused on water (Sustainable Development Goal 6) in Europe and globally. Thus, our goal was to assess to which degree the chemical composition of industrial wastewater could be estimated based on the industry's typology according to its International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) class. We collected wastewater effluent water samples from 60 industrial wastewater effluents (before any wastewater treatment process), accounting for 5 samples each of 12 ISIC classes, analyzed the composition of key contaminants (i.e. European Commission rated priority compounds and watchlist), and statistically assessed the similarities and differences amongst ISIC classes using ordination and random forest analyses. The results showed statistically significant linkages between most ISIC classes and the composition of produced wastewater. Among the analytical parameters measured, the random forest methodology allowed identifying a sub-set particularly relevant for classification or eventual contamination prediction based on ISIC class. This is an important applied research topic with strong management implications to (i) determine pollution emission caps for each individual ISIC class, (ii) define monitoring schemes to sample and analyze industrial wastewater, and (iii) enable predicting pollutant loads discharged in river basins with scarce information. These encouraging results urge us to expand our work into other ISIC classes and water quality parameters to draw a full picture of the relationship between ISIC classes and produced wastewater.