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" Infrastructure, Hydrology, and Policy: Socio-Hydrological Modeling of Urban Water Consumption Dynamics "
Margaret Ellen Garcia
Islam, Shafiqul
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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804565
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| Doc. No
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TL49398
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| Call number
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1912291220; 10274205
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| Main Entry
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Alebdha, Fahd
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| Title & Author
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Infrastructure, Hydrology, and Policy: Socio-Hydrological Modeling of Urban Water Consumption Dynamics\ Margaret Ellen GarciaIslam, Shafiqul
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| College
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Tufts University
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| Date
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2017
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| field of study
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Civil Engineering
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2017
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| Page No
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236
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| Note
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Committee members: Cohn, Avery; Portney, Kent E.; Sivapalan, Murugesu
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| Note
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Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-83373-7
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| Abstract
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The reliability of our water systems depends not only on natural hydrological systems but on the human systems that both change and respond to changes in natural systems. Fundamental to planning and managing a reliable water system is an understanding of system response to past changes. Socio-hydrological modeling has the potential to address this challenge by integrating feedback between human and hydrological systems to assess how, for example, demographic and climatic changes propagate throughout the system. However, broadening the scope of analysis exacerbates the existing challenge of translating real world complexity into a tractable model and actionable science. This dissertation builds upon recent work in socio-hydrology to address the challenge of modeling coupled human-hydrological systems in the context of urban water consumption dynamics. A model development process is presented to increase model transparency and encourage questioning of disciplinary assumptions and integration of disciplinary methodologies. This process is applied to develop a model of per capita water consumption in Las Vegas. Three decision variables, rates, water efficiency codes and utility response to water stress, are identified as drivers of per capita water consumption change. This water consumption module is integrated into a water supply model and compared to a traditional water supply model where consumption is an exogenous variable. The comparison shows clear advantages of the endogenous water consumption model. Its use enabled the exploration of the interactions between demand management policies, supply and external variables, and altered the assessment of available supply and demand side options. Furthermore, this endogenous model results show higher levels of reliability and lower water stress across scenarios, due to the inclusion of conservation response to water stress, implying that maintaining water utility and consumer adaptive capacity is critical to realizing the performance gains seen in this model. Future application of this model, and models that similarly integrate feedback between human and natural systems, have the potential to select policies and infrastructure investments that utilize existing feedback and test for unintended path dependencies.
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| Subject
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Water Resource Management; Political science
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| Descriptor
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Social sciences;Earth sciences;Consumption;Nevada;Planning;Socio-hydrology;Urban infrastructure;Water
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| Added Entry
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Islam, Shafiqul
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Civil EngineeringTufts University
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