Effects of Urban Development Patterns on Municipal Water Shortage

Hadi Heidari,Sybil Sharvelle,Travis Warziniack,Mazdak Arabi

doi:10.3389/frwa.2021.694817

Abstract

While urban areas are being threatened by water shortage due to climate change and rapid population growth, effects of urban development patterns on future municipal water shortage are rarely investigated. We address this aspect of urbanization by assessing the impacts of sprawl vs. high-density patterns on future changes in the sub-annual water shortage intensity-duration-frequency (IDF) relationships. The City of Fort Collins, Colorado, water supply system is chosen as a representative region that is rapidly developing over the last decades. The future water supply is estimated using the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) driven with a hot-dry climate model from the statistically downscaled Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 5 (CMIP5) projections. Future water demand is projected using the Integrated Urban Water Model (IUWM) under both sprawl and high-density development patterns. The demonstration study reveals that urban areas under the sprawl development pattern are likely to experience water shortage events with higher intensity, duration, and frequency compared to the high-density pattern. Characterizing impacts of urban development patterns on future water shortage conditions is required for sustainable water management and smart urban growth and can help urban planners and water managers to develop an adaptive path to meet future water demand and decrease the vulnerability of municipal water supply systems to shortage.

Highlights

Municipal water shortage is a crucial problem around the world due to the integrated impacts of climate change and rapid urbanization (Mukherjee et al, 2018; Liang et al, 2020)
Water demand for the city of Fort Collins increases over time due to population growth, sprawl development results in higher total water demand compared to the high-density development pattern
Four important conclusions can be made here: 1) The sprawl development pattern can result in more water consumption due to higher quantities of water used for outdoor activities such as landscape irrigation

Summary

Introduction

Municipal water shortage is a crucial problem around the world due to the integrated impacts of climate change and rapid urbanization (Mukherjee et al, 2018; Liang et al, 2020). Municipal water shortage can be defined as the lack of sufficient water supply to meet demand in urban areas (Foti et al, 2014; Zhao et al, 2019; Heidari et al, 2020a). Water supply may be significantly affected in the future by climate change as a result of varying precipitation and increasing temperature (Heidari et al, 2020b, 2021b), water demand may increase over time due to rapid urbanization (Liu et al, 2020). Rapid urbanization can intensify imbalance between water supply and demand and lead to higher likelihood of water shortage conditions in developed areas in the future (Foti et al, 2012; Brown et al, 2019). The issues of increasing water shortage conditions and limited water resources may restrict the farther urbanization (McDonald et al, 2011; Fan et al, 2017).

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion