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Interest in renewable energy adoption in the water industry is growing amid numerous barriers. Overcoming these barriers requires an understanding of the influencing factors that drive renewable energy adoption, namely i) what drives the industry to uptake renewable energy projects, ii) what policies and regulations are perceived by the industry as effective in supporting this trend, and iii) what renewable energy technologies are preferred. To identify influencing factors, a survey was conducted of Australian professionals working in water and wastewater related fields. Reducing costs associated with energy consumption were perceived as the most significant factors influencing renewable energy projects. Respondents perceived compulsory greenhouse gas emissions reduction as the most influential policy. Respondents did not perceive any government financial policy or regulation established for the development of a renewable energy market as highly influential for the water industry. Among all respondents, biogas from sewage sludge and solar photovoltaic were considered the most important technologies available to the industry. Yet, the priority of these technologies differed between respondents working for water/wastewater utilities and the rest of respondents, as the former perceived biogas from co-digestion as the most important technology, while the rest perceived solar PV as the dominant technology.

Water and wastewater utilities have increasingly invested in on-site renewable electricity generation to address rising energy costs, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and meet renewable energy targets. Yet, the extent to which renewable electricity sources are currently adopted by these utilities is unknown. This work quantifies the current level of renewable electricity generated by Australian water and wastewater utilities, the renewable electricity sources adopted, and their overall contribution to the total water industry electricity generation. In 2018, the Australian water industry generated 18% (279 GWh/y) of its electricity demand from on-site renewable electricity sources. Biogas from anaerobic digestion of wastewater and sewage sludge accounted for 67% (187 GWh/y) of the electricity generated, followed by hydropower (30%, 84 GWh/y), biogas from co-digestion and waste-to-energy through anaerobic digestion of organic feedstock (2%, 5.5 GWh/y), and solar photovoltaic (1%, 2.2 GWh/y). Further recovery of biogas from wastewater and sewage sludge might be limited by the economies of scale. However, hydropower could still be an untapped resource. Solar photovoltaic did not contribute significantly to the electricity generation of the industry, and space requirements to install large systems might limit its future development to a more significant level of electricity generation. To increase electricity generation and achieve the renewable energy targets, external energy sources will need to be imported, such as organic feedstock in co-digestion systems or waste-to-energy through anaerobic digestion facilities.

Urban metabolism is increasingly being adopted to guide city planning towards improved water, energy and material efficiency. Stakeholder participation in the adoption of this concept will be important, and hence effective communication will be crucial. This study aimed to determine how urban metabolism has been communicated and interpreted, with attention to water. The approach included (i) literature review, (ii) structured international interviews and (iii) thematic analysis. We demonstrate how diverse language, metaphors, methods, visual imagery, data and information have been used to communicate this complex topic. Maps, Sankey diagrams, concept figures, spider diagrams, pictorial flow diagrams, art, and animation have all been used. We observe barriers to communication in order to understand the communication techniques which may be effective, and clarify issues relating to awareness and target audiences. We include a discussion of the themes that emerged from the research that are relevant for integrated water planning and the power of visual imagery. Inconsistent language is influenced by widely different overarching metaphors which range from ‘organism’ to ‘ecosystem’ metabolism. Fragmented data are a major gap for shared understanding. The research provides new understanding of how stakeholders perceive urban water metabolism and its relationship to Integrated urban water management.

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Many cities are moving towards increased use of recycled water to meet water demand due to freshwater scarcity, population growth, urbanisation and climate change. Water recycling requires substantial energy. Water utilities are facing serious challenges providing cost-effective and reliable water services under rising energy cost. Energy is further linked with global climate change through carbon intensive Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) emissions. However, few studies have attempted to understand the energy use of water recycling systems and how energy intensity of those systems varies with scale and technology. In this paper, we undertook a comprehensive and systematic literature and data review to understand the energy intensity of water recycling systems. We used four “cases”: (1) Centralised Potable (2) Centralised Non-Potable, (3) Decentralised Potable and (4) Decentralised Non-Potable systems to structure our work. Our analysis demonstrates how energy intensity of water recycling systems decreases with increasing size for a wide range of scale and for different treatment technologies. The treatment energy intensity for centralised systems having capacity less than 5 MLD varies from 0.48 to 2.0 kWh/kL for non-potable and 0.75 to 2.0 kWh/k for potable; for capacities between 5 and 200 MLD varies from 0.2 to 0.9 kWh/kL for potable and from 0.25 to 0.75 kWh/kL for non-potable; and for any capacity greater than 200 MLD, the treatment energy intensity is less than 0.8 kWh/kL for potable and 0.55 kWh/kL for non-potable systems. But current centralised water recycling systems have a treatment energy intensity from 0.65 to 1.4 kWh/kL for Potable for capacity from 21 to 378 MLD and from 0.6 to 1.0 kWh/kL for non-potable systems for 6 to 350 MLD. In the case of decentralised systems, smaller systems consume higher energy than centralised systems but larger decentralised Systems (mid-size) have lower energy intensity. Though the treatment energy intensity of

As global population and urbanization increase, so do the direct and indirect environmental impacts of construction around the world. Low-impact products, buildings, precincts and cities are needed to mitigate the effects of building construction and use. Analysis of embodied energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across these scales is becoming more important to support this direction. The calculation of embodied impacts requires rigorous, flexible and comprehensive assessment tools. Firstly, we present the Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) as one such tool discussing its structure, function and wide scope of application. Secondly, we demonstrate its potential high level of resolution in a case study: assessing embodied GHG emissions in an aluminium-framed window by combining product-specific life-cycle inventory data. The input-output analysis at the core of the IELab is mathematically comprehensive in the assessment of direct and indirect impacts and the tool can be applied at a range of scales from building component, to precincts and cities, or to the entire construction industry. IELab uses a flexible formalism that enables consistent harmonisation of diverse datasets and tractable updating of input data. The emissions and energy database supporting IELab has detailed data, aligning with economic accounts and data on labour, water, materials and waste that enrich assessment across other dimensions of sustainability. IELab is a comprehensive, flexible and robust assessment tool well positioned to respond to the challenge of assessing and aiding the design of a low-impact built environment.

© 2018 Elsevier Ltd Advanced metering technologies coupled with informatics creates an opportunity to form digital multi-utility service providers. These providers will be able to concurrently collect a customers’ medium-high resolution water, electricity and gas demand data and provide user-friendly platforms to feed this information back to customers and supply/distribution utility organisations. Providers that can install low-cost integrative systems will reap the benefits of derived operational synergies and access to mass markets not bounded by historical city, state or country limits. This paper provides a vision of the required transformative process and features of an integrated multi-utility service provider covering the system architecture, opportunities and benefits, impediments and strategies, and business opportunities. The heart of the paper is focused on demonstrating data modelling processes and informatics opportunities for contemporaneously collected demand data, through illustrative examples and four informative water-energy nexus case studies. Finally, the paper provides an overview of the transformative R&D priorities to realise the vision.

Decision-making at regional scales requires timely information. Within four months of the release of official national statistics, we have produced a time-series (2008–2015) of balanced sub-national, multi-regional supply-and-use tables (MR-SUT), integrated with a set of socio-economic and environmental accounts. This was achieved using the Australian IELab, where data used in this study are available (https://ielab.info/resources/91). Four multi-regional, environmentally extended supply-use tables regionalised in different ways were produced to demonstrate the flexibility of tailoring input–output models to specific research or policy questions. Results for satellite coefficients are sensitive to the chosen regional grouping and method for regionalisation. We demonstrate the relevance of such purpose-built information to government and corporate decision-makers by analysing the indirect economic and employment consequences of a slowdown of the mining boom in Western Australia. The demonstrated innovations in flexibility and timeliness will help move past some of the limitations that have historically hindered the uptake and utility of applied input–output analysis.

The current fabric of urban areas is largely the result of past land development and land-use planning decisions. Historically, there was relatively little consideration of the impact of these decisions upon hydrological systems within and outside urban areas. Despite their close relationship, urban and regional planning and water resources management have typically been carried out separately and guided by different institutional arrangements. The range of impacts of urbanisation on hydrological systems at the city-region scale, and the dependence of urbanised areas upon these systems, call for better integration between the sectors of urban and regional planning and water resources management to ensure the sustainability and resilience of cities and their regions to future changes and uncertainties. This paper evaluates the extent to which planning mechanisms currently support integration between land-use and water resource sectors. The evaluation draws on a comparative analysis of 113 statutory and non-statutory planning mechanisms in three Australian capital city-regions: South East Queensland, and the Melbourne and Perth Metropolitan regions. Results indicate that the function of water at the city-region scale, including its role in supporting environmental connectivity, needs to be better understood and considered by land-use planning systems; improved institutional capacity is required to enable both sectors to deal with future changes and uncertainties related to water resources; and emergent planning trends supportive of the consideration of water connectivity at the city-region scale are yet to be fully implemented. Based on the results, the paper concludes by exploring how the concept of urban metabolism may facilitate better integration between the two sectors, along with the identification of best suited planning mechanisms and needed changes in governance and institutional arrangements conducive to integration.

Improving resource management in urban areas has been enshrined in visions for achieving sustainable urban areas, but to date it has been difficult to quantify performance indicators to help identify more sustainable outcomes, especially for water resources. In this work, we advance quantitative indicators for what we refer to as the ‘metabolic’ features of urban water management: those related to resource efficiency (for water and also water-related energy and nutrients), supply internalisation, urban hydrological performance, sustainable extraction, and recognition of the diverse functions of water. We derived indicators in consultation with stakeholders to bridge this gap between visions and performance indicators. This was done by first reviewing and categorising water-related resource management objectives for city-regions, and then deriving indicators that can gauge performance against them. The ability for these indicators to be quantified using data from an urban water mass balance was also examined. Indicators of water efficiency, supply internalisation, and hydrological performance (relative to a reference case) can be generated using existing urban water mass balance methods. In the future, indicators for water-related energy and nutrient efficiencies could be generated by overlaying the urban water balance with energy and nutrient data. Indicators of sustainable extraction and recognising diverse functions of water will require methods for defining sustainable extraction rates and a water functionality index.

Compiling, deploying and utilising large-scale databases that integrate environmental and economic data have traditionally been labour- and cost-intensive processes, hindered by the large amount of disparate and misaligned data that must be collected and harmonised. The Australian Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory (IELab) is a novel, collaborative approach to compiling large-scale environmentally extended multi-region input-output (MRIO) models.The utility of the IELab product is greatly enhanced by avoiding the need to lock in an MRIO structure at the time the MRIO system is developed. The IELab advances the idea of the "mother-daughter" construction principle, whereby a regionally and sectorally very detailed "mother" table is set up, from which "daughter" tables are derived to suit specific research questions. By introducing a third tier - the "root classification" - IELab users are able to define their own mother-MRIO configuration, at no additional cost in terms of data handling. Customised mother-MRIOs can then be built, which maximise disaggregation in aspects that are useful to a family of research questions.The second innovation in the IELab system is to provide a highly automated collaborative research platform in a cloud-computing environment, greatly expediting workflows and making these computational benefits accessible to all users.Combining these two aspects realises many benefits. The collaborative nature of the IELab development project allows significant savings in resources. Timely deployment is possible by coupling automation procedures with the comprehensive input from multiple teams. User-defined MRIO tables, coupled with high performance computing, mean that MRIO analysis will be useful and accessible for a great many more research applications than would otherwise be possible. By ensuring that a common set of analytical tools such as for hybrid life-cycle assessment is adopted, the IELab will facilitate the harmonisation of fragmented, di