Urban WEF Nexus: An Approach for the Use of Internal Resources under Climate Change

Abstract

This study strives to utilize WEF resources for the sustainable development of the city, with respect to future climate change. Two diffusion scenarios of Rcp8.5 and Rcp2.6 from the 5th Assessment Report by the IPCC, with the output of the HADGEM2 model were used and the city of Borujerd, Iran was chosen as the case study. The urban morphological dataset was calculated using ArcGIS. Furthermore, the water requirement of some crops (apples, grapes, lettuce and vegetables with leaves) is estimated with the NETWAT and CROPWAT models. This output indicates that in the next period, an approximate 2.25 °C change will take place in the temperature and the rainfall will change between 20–40%. Adopting a WEF Nexus, this study suggests that an urban centralized agriculture will provide 21.3% of the local demand for fruit and a significant amount of the local demand for vegetables. The water reused for urban agricultural irrigation purposes and 3.6% of the freshwater resource demand and sewage cycling can be supplied by harvesting rainwater. Water treatment and recycling can also provide 60.74% of the city’s current water demand. Furthermore, the production of biogas from human sewage and urban wastewater can save 32.4% of the current electricity, on a monthly basis.