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Sustainability indicators have become essential tools to deal with compartmentalized resources planning and management in cities. The development of water, energy, and food nexus (WEF nexus) indicators is a prominent goal of current research, but the focus is mainly on economic issues and material flows. Attention to the local scale and context, social aspects, and the inclusion of non-academic actors is mostly lacking. To address these gaps, this paper reports and reflects on the co-creation of sustainability indicators related to the WEF nexus in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. With a transdisciplinary approach, non-academic actors were included in the different stages of the process using the Urban Living Lab methodology, to improve the usability of the produced indicators' set. The case of São Paulo concerned on-going actions in the peri-urban and rural areas of the city which seek to improve environmental protection by stimulating more sustainable forms of agriculture. Thirty-four indicators were developed through a sequence of interactive activities, such as workshops, meetings, and field trips. The presented process aims to strongly enhance usability by actively involving users from the start, connecting the nexus approach to previous knowledge and familiar frameworks, paying attention to the local scale and context, and to social aspects, and by anticipating future use in various ways., (© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2022.)

The results of the analysis of water utility performance studies based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) can be very sensitive to the methodological approach and the variables employed. This study investigates approaches and variables for developing countries in order to identify an adequate model for universal access. Three models were developed and compared. The first used traditional variables, the second considered the quality of service variables, and the last are expanded on the second by incorporating the realization of the human right to water into efficiency estimation. Methodological approaches comprising the variable returns to scale DEA (most common for developing countries) and slack-based directional distance function (employed in this study) were also compared. The case study of 77 Brazilian water utilities suggests that a model that incorporates the objective of universal access in the efficiency estimation changes substantialy utility efficiency scores. Therefore, utilities that make investments to reach the universal access can be penalized since traditional models incorporate the expenses, but fail to capture the results. The research conclusions suggest that approaches and variable choices are likely to impact on the analysis results, misrepresenting them regardless of the purpose for using DEA in the study., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interests The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The diffusion of the indicators for monitoring sustainable development goals (SDG) has conceptual and symbolic uses far beyond their instrumental uses. Despite its value in dismantling social and economic inequalities, the goal regarding guaranteed of water and sanitation for all did not specify any indicators for this purpose. This research contributes to the discussions on the best way to monitor inequality in access to water by the SDG. Inequality measures established in other areas of study and specific to the access to water were analyzed as their applicability for this purpose. Our study finds that current United Nations strategy does not allow for robust conclusions and does not respect some economical axioms. Furthermore, we show the potentialities and inconveniences of the most important metrics, but it can be concluded that if the objective is merely to measure inequality and communicate easily, the concentration index is the most appropriate measure. These results may contribute to a more refined discussion of how the SDGs can measures progress towards equality in water access and provides information to guide governments agendas for equality in water access., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Due to the importance of analyzing the efficiency of water utilities and the large number of publications in this area, at least five reviews have already been carried out to identify patterns and trends. These reviews aimed to cover worldwide studies, and the results may not correspond to the reality in developing countries. Therefore, this review provides a literature update on the quantitative studies of water and sanitation services, focusing on studies carried out in developing countries. This overview mainly examines the economies of scale and scope, public versus private ownership, and the impact of regulation. As expected, our results show patterns that differ from those found in worldwide reviews (e.g., the influence of regulatory incentives on operator efficiency and economies of scope). In addition, this paper presents patterns regarding the quantitative methods adopted, as well as some trends and areas for possible future research., (Copyright © 2019. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

This paper presents the Solid Waste Management Index (SWaMI) for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The main objectives are to present how SWaMI was developed, to apply the Index in three different universities in Brazil and one in United States, to statistically compare the results and to present an analysis of these HEIs under the SWaMI assessment dimensions perspective. The SwaMI fills a gap regarding a specific waste management tool for HEIs decision makers, considering the responsibility of educating and training future leaders and the need to insert the sustainable waste management discussion in its end activities. Criteria were selected through literature review and divided in dimensions, further weighted according to their significance in waste management. These weights were discussed and stipulated based on expert opinion using the Budget Allocation Process (BAP) weighting method. The individual indexes for each dimension were further combined into a composite index through the Linear Aggregation Method. Main findings shows that when comparisons were deployed between HEIs, no statistical significance was noticed when the means were compared between universities using ANOVA with Tukey test. Nevertheless, when comparing each dimension within each HEI, there was significant difference between the Policy and Management dimension and the other three dimensions of the evaluation criteria at USP. Researchers concluded that the SWaMI provides decision makers with graphic results concerning HEIs solid waste management situation, hence, it allows the creation of a baseline data on how the current system works, pointing out the dimensions that present the greatest weakness allowing to perform benchmarking between buildings, institutes, and even between HEIs., (Copyright © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

The main purpose of this article is to identify access to: social assistance inclusion programs; assistance from health agents; public water supply services; and water saving practices, in areas of irregular occupation in Brazil. A stratified random sampling technique by clusters was adopted with a simple sampling strategy. In the universe of 14,079 households, 68 community leaders were identified, representing 6,800 households on average, in a normalized distribution (mean zero, standard deviation 1), deemed to include situations covering 96% of the cases with a margin of error of + or - 1% of the average. The theoretical approach proposes a reflection and verification through questionnaires on the mechanisms of exclusion. Poverty perpetuates the vicious circle of inequality, risks to health and the environment, and it is necessary that these should be considered in the policies and procedures for urban expansion. As a conclusion, various challenges were identified for serving areas of social-environmental vulnerability - the needs to: improve the low quality of health and water services in subnormal agglomerations; modify the behavior of the population accessing the networks in a clandestine manner; and to put inclusive governance mechanisms in place.

The adoption of principles of equality and universality stipulated in legislation for the sanitation sector requires discussions on innovation. The existing model was able to meet sanitary demands, but was unable to attend all areas causing disparities in vulnerable areas. The universal implementation of sanitation requires identification of the know-how that promotes it and analysis of the model adopted today to establish a new method. Analysis of how different viewpoints on the restructuring process is necessary for the definition of public policy, especially in health, and understanding its complexities and importance in confirming social practices and organizational designs. These are discussed to contribute to universal implementation of sanitation in urban areas by means of a review of the literature and practices in the industry. By way of conclusion, it is considered that accepting a particular concept or idea in sanitation means choosing some effective interventions in the network and on the lives of individual users, and implies a redefinition of the space in which it exercises control and management of sewerage networks, such that connected users are perceived as groups with different interests.