Sustainability assessment of water resource systems using a novel hydro-socio-economic index (HSEI)

摘要

Sustainable management of water resources is an essential process for securing Earth's present and future generation life. This study offers development of a new comprehensive framework and index for socio-economic evaluation of water resource systems. The hydro-socio-economic index (HSEI) is made of several economic, demographic, technology and communication, and health and sanitation factors at different temporal and spatial scales. The major foci of this research are estimation of HSEI and the analysis of their socio-economic situation of those European countries with increasing renewable water per capita during 1998-2017 periods. The HSEI values for all of the studied European countries range from 0.480 to 0.521 based on the single and combined methods. According to the qualitative classification, the index values are classified in good level for all fourteen countries. The results show that the increase in renewable water per capita influences socio-economic parameters in those countries. The result of this study will further support future investigation of selecting underlying factors that can be used as a criterion for the future planning and decision-making processes to form sustainable policies.