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| Value chain model of water and sewerage companies (modified after AWWA, 1997). The figure displays the value functions and the variables used to characterise them. The variables are named in the appendix.
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Using the example of raw water quality this paper examines the relationship between different spatial characteristics (geographical and physical properties) of Water and Sewerage Companies (WaSCs) supply and sewage areas and response to the Water Framework Directive. Results were obtained from thematic analysis and content analysis of 14 interviews...
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Context 1
... methods applied combine qualitative and quantitative analysis of interviews with a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis of spatial characteristics of WaSCs. This analysis identifies whether spatial characteristic of WaSCs can be associated with the findings obtained from the interviews. A comparative case study is used to investigate WFD implementation in context ( Yin 2003 ). Each WaSCs represents an individual case. Nine out of a population of ten English and Welsh WaSCs were studied. One organisation could not be accessed for interviews. Using the value chain model adopted from the American Water Works Association ( AWWA 1997 ) 51 variables describing WaSCs were selected for each business function (Figure 1). Data were obtained from public domains (Ofwat, DWI, EA, European Environment Agency, individual 1. Variables water – business companies). function characteristics—with Owing to limited miss- data availability ing data points not all were business removed functions were represented equally 2. Variables strong which in the exhibited data set. cross Water correlation service information of r 2 $ 0.8 was were represented identified and stronger summarised in the ( Juniper data set et al. (Figure 1). 1997 ). 3. Alongside Remaining the variables information were on processed business using functions, PCA. data on 4. the Kaiser value criterion added was ( Kaiser collected 1960 too. ) was applied 5. Factor Hierarchical loadings Cluster for each Analysis combination and PCA were of the applied selected to generate factors groups were plotted of WaSCs (factor with plot) maximal to reveal similarity redundant within and variables maximal (i.e. dissimilarity variables between with factor the loadings group (see of Diaz ^ 0.5 et and al. 2004 variables ; Kim et with al. 2007 similar ). factor loadings) The method employed seven steps: 1. Variables – business function characteristics—with miss- ing data points were removed 2. Variables which exhibited cross correlation of r 2 $ 0.8 were identified and summarised ( Juniper et al. 1997 ). 3. Remaining variables were processed using PCA. 4. Kaiser criterion ( Kaiser 1960 ) was applied 5. Factor loadings for each combination of the selected factors were plotted (factor plot) to reveal redundant variables (i.e. variables with factor loadings of ^ 0.5 and variables with similar factor ...
Context 2
... methods applied combine qualitative and quantitative analysis of interviews with a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis of spatial characteristics of WaSCs. This analysis identifies whether spatial characteristic of WaSCs can be associated with the findings obtained from the interviews. A comparative case study is used to investigate WFD implementation in context ( Yin 2003 ). Each WaSCs represents an individual case. Nine out of a population of ten English and Welsh WaSCs were studied. One organisation could not be accessed for interviews. Using the value chain model adopted from the American Water Works Association ( AWWA 1997 ) 51 variables describing WaSCs were selected for each business function (Figure 1). Data were obtained from public domains (Ofwat, DWI, EA, European Environment Agency, individual 1. Variables water – business companies). function characteristics—with Owing to limited miss- data availability ing data points not all were business removed functions were represented equally 2. Variables strong which in the exhibited data set. cross Water correlation service information of r 2 $ 0.8 was were represented identified and stronger summarised in the ( Juniper data set et al. (Figure 1). 1997 ). 3. Alongside Remaining the variables information were on processed business using functions, PCA. data on 4. the Kaiser value criterion added was ( Kaiser collected 1960 too. ) was applied 5. Factor Hierarchical loadings Cluster for each Analysis combination and PCA were of the applied selected to generate factors groups were plotted of WaSCs (factor with plot) maximal to reveal similarity redundant within and variables maximal (i.e. dissimilarity variables between with factor the loadings group (see of Diaz ^ 0.5 et and al. 2004 variables ; Kim et with al. 2007 similar ). factor loadings) The method employed seven steps: 1. Variables – business function characteristics—with miss- ing data points were removed 2. Variables which exhibited cross correlation of r 2 $ 0.8 were identified and summarised ( Juniper et al. 1997 ). 3. Remaining variables were processed using PCA. 4. Kaiser criterion ( Kaiser 1960 ) was applied 5. Factor loadings for each combination of the selected factors were plotted (factor plot) to reveal redundant variables (i.e. variables with factor loadings of ^ 0.5 and variables with similar factor ...
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... The framework is divided into a bidirectional flow into upstream (from natural resources) and downstream (returning to the natural environment), with respectively differentiated activities and value adding process involved in value chain steps according to the direction of water flow. Spiller et al., 2009) ...
1. Using Value Chain Analysis to Promote NbS
This report applies Value Chain Analysis (VCA) to key economic sectors within the MERLIN project, exploring how Nature-based Solutions (NbS) can be integrated into freshwater ecosystem restoration. The focus of VCA is to understand and illustrate the mechanisms through which value is created across sectors, including economic, social, and environmental dimensions. This extended approach goes beyond conventional analyses that prioritise commercial value, emphasising how NbS contribute to
broader societal and ecological benefits. By examining examples from the Water Supply and Sanitation (WSS), Agriculture, Insurance, and Peat Extraction sectors in Europe, the report demonstrates that VCA is an effective tool for promoting NbS
adoption. It highlights how NbS create value in ways that are both attractive to businesses and aligned with sustainability goals.
2. Synergising Economic and Ecological Gains with NbS within Value Chains
Nature-based Solutions (NbS) provide an opportunity to align economic and ecological goals within value chains. By identifying sector-specific value chain challenges, integrating NbS helps make environmental resilience and economic interests mutually beneficial. Enhancing freshwater ecosystem resilience with NbS is not just corporate responsibility or green marketing but a strategy for generating commercial benefits. While initial external support may be needed to kickstart NbS, long-term gains such as reduced costs, risk mitigation, and enhanced reputation make NbS attractive for businesses, ultimately driving internal investment.
3. Leveraging Financial Support to Implement NbS across Value Chains
Pro-environmental capital investments and financial incentives are crucial in driving the adoption of NbS across value chains. These supports enable key actors to gain economic advantages while implementing sustainable practices, creating win-win scenarios that make NbS integration commercially viable in the long term. However, the role of standards is equally important in ensuring consumer support for NbS. Certification schemes and labels, while helpful, often face challenges due to the proliferation of different standards, some of which lack proper accountability mechanisms. For example, schemes like the RPP (Responsibly Produced Peat) support freshwater NbS but remain largely invisible to consumers, limiting their impact. Streamlining standards and enhancing transparency can help ensure broader consumer awareness and support for NbS.
4. Enhancing Standards for NbS Integration into Value Chains
Many sectoral standards need to be renewed or updated for the purpose of a more comprehensive integration of NbS, with possibilities to involve a certification scheme or consumer label issuing procedure. More up-to-date sectoral standards are considered as an institutional instrument to provide systematic solutions to include NbS into value chains, as they provide a structured framework for ensuring that NbS are implemented effectively, facilitating their adoption while offering long-term economic and environmental benefits. This is particularly important for aligning value chains with broader environmental goals.
5. Fostering Stakeholder Engagement to Maximise NbS in Value Chains
The success of mainstreaming NbS hinges on collaboration among various stakeholders involved in interconnected value chains. Public agencies, private companies, NGOs, and local communities must work together to ensure that NbS are effectively integrated and that their benefits are maximised among different actors. Moreover, a systematic understanding of NbS in value chain requires also cross-sectoral cooperation and not limiting the vision within sectors.
6. Driving Innovation and Sustainability through NbS in Value Chains
Ongoing research and development are necessary to further integrate NbS into sectoral value chains. On the one hand, more technical advancements are desired to improve the efficacy and efficiency of NbS. On the other hand, strengthening institutional capacities and creating platforms for knowledge sharing and collaboration will drive innovation and sustainability, ensuring that NbS can continue to enhance the value-adding process across various sectors.
... Using the frequency count of species cited by participants as a proxy for themes in general, tb-PCA demonstrated how unconstrained ordination techniques can be used to visually represent multidimensional relationships between participants and interview responses in a 2D diagram (Figure 2.7). Although some studies have made use of PCA on such types of datasets, they do not all make use of the visual application of this method (Spiller et al. 2009;Ayiesah et al. 2014). Using MCA, Ponnam and Dawra (2013) have argued for the visual application of unconstrained ordinations on themes, calling their method "visual thematic analysis" and some studies have followed suit, such as presenting diagrams for CA (Sbalchiero and Tuzzi 2016). ...
... In a similar approach to reducing datasets into meaningful ordinations, Tareau (2019) Furthermore, these methods are frequently used in ecology in combination with other types of multivariate analyses such as cluster analysis (Legendre and Legendre 2012). Some studies have also made use of cluster analysis to identify groups of participants based on thematic datasets (Spiller et al. 2009;Sbalchiero and Tuzzi 2016). In a similar fashion to how we use multivariate analysis on responses from participants, Cuerrier, Brouillet and Barabé (1998) have used a combination of ordinations and cluster analysis to detect patterns amongst a number of taxonomists 119 based on their classification structure of plant families. ...
... , describe how to transform thematic datasets made from content analysis to use in multivariate analysis and there have since been several studies resorting to such methods(Spiller et al. 2009;Ponnam and Dawra 2013;Ayiesah et al. 2014;Sbalchiero and Tuzzi 2016). Although the methods employed in these studies are useful tools for detecting and analyzing patterns between participants and their responses, such as principal component analysis (PCA), correspondence analysis (CA), multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and multidimensional scaling (MDS), these techniques for analyzing multidimensional relationships are further limited by their inability to provide tests of significance on the patterns detected. ...
Les Peuples autochtones à travers le monde sont disproportionnellement touchés par le diabète. Parmi ces peuples, les Cris d’Eeyou Istchee et les Pekuakamilnuatsh, au Québec (Canada), ainsi que les Parikwene, en Guyane française (France), recourent à leur médecine locale pour soigner cette maladie. En 173 entrevues semi-dirigées, 208 participants venant de ces communautés et/ou travaillant dans leurs services de santé ont décrit ces médecines. Une méthode de recherche mixte, combinant des analyses thématiques à des statistiques multivariées, est développée pour analyser ces descriptions.Ces analyses ont montré que les participants cris, ilnu et parikwene décrivent leurs médecines en lien avec le diabète tant par les différents éléments du monde naturel, que les pratiques et coutumes locales qui en découlent, que les concepts les liant au territoire. Les pharmacopées à base animales et végétales font parties des thèmes les plus discutés. Plus de 381 espèces (109 animaux, 267 plantes, cinq lichens et champignons) lient les systèmes médicinales et alimentaires ensemble via des notions associées au bien-être ou aux propriétés organoleptiques. Au Québec, là où la population autochtone est plus impliquée dans les services de santé, il existe un rapprochement de la description des médecines locales entre le secteur de la santé et ses usagers.De façon générale, la place de l’alimentation dans les médecines locales ne peut être négligée dans le contexte du diabète. De plus, ces médecines sont indissociables du territoire qui offre un espace de guérison, de subsistance, et de continuité culturelle. Cela renvoie, in fine, à des questions importantes sur la reconnaissance des droits autochtones et des droits fonciers.
... The scope of this paper is set to investigate the urban water system, which comprises water services from source to customer to discharge or reuse of wastewater (Spiller et al., 2009). Furthermore, the urban water systems also includes the drainage of the urban area (Loucks and Van Beek, 2005). ...
Sustainability is commonly assessed along environmental, societal, economic and technological dimensions. A crucial aspect of sustainability is that inter-generational equality must be ensured. This requires that sustainability is attained in the here and now as well as into the future. Therefore, what is perceived as ‘sustainable’ changes as a function of societal opinion and technological and scientific progress. A concept that describes the ability of systems to change is adaptive capacity. Literature suggests that the ability of systems to adapt is an integral part of sustainable development. This paper demonstrates that indicators measuring adaptive capacity are underrepresented in current urban water sustainability studies. Furthermore, it is discussed under which sustainability dimensions adaptive capacity indicators are lacking and why. Of the > 90 indicators analysed, only nine are adaptive capacity indicators, of which six are socio-cultural, two technological, one economical and none environmental. This infrequent use of adaptive capacity indicators in sustainability assessments led to the conclusion that the challenge of dynamic and uncertain urban water systems is, with the exception of the socio-cultural dimension, not yet sufficiently reflected in the application of urban water sustainability indicators. This raises concerns about the progress towards urban water systems that can transform as a response variation and change. Therefore, research should focus on developing methods and indicators that can define, evaluate and quantify adaptive capacity under the economic, environmental and technical dimension of sustainability. Furthermore, it should be evaluated whether sustainability frameworks that focus on the control processes of urban water systems are more suitable for measuring adaptive capacity, than the assessments along environmental, economic, socio-cultural and technological dimensions.
... A few authors discuss whether the natural-physical environment can be a crucial factor for successful adoption of innovations, especially when organisations are concerned with natural resources management (Ormrod 1990). For water utilities, natural-physical conditions have been shown to affect innovation pathways of water utilities in the UK (Cave 2009;Spiller et al. 2009) and implementation of water saving campaigns in Italy ( Romano et al. 2014). ...
... Hydrogeology, water source and catchment size. The properties of an aquifer water source, whether the water source is groundwater or surface water, catchment size-in terms of km 2 or the extent to which farmers have a stake (Spiller et al. 2009). Land use. ...
... Land use. The type of agricultural land, peat land or urban land ( Spiller et al. 2009). ...
Innovations in technology and organisations are central to enabling the water sector to adapt to major environmental changes such as climate change, land degradation or drinking water pollution. While there are literatures on innovation as a process and on the factors that influence it, there is little research that integrates these. Development of such an integrated understanding of innovation is central to understanding how policy makers and organisations can stimulate and direct environmental innovation. In the research reported here a framework is developed that enables such an integrated analysis of innovation process and factors. From research interviews and the literature twenty factors were identified that affect the five stages of the environmental innovation process in English and Welsh water utilities. The environmental innovations investigated are measures taken by water utilities to reduce or prevent pollution in drinking water catchments rather than technical measures to treat water. These Source Control Interventions are similar to other environmental innovations, such as ecosystem and species conservation, in that they emphasise the mix of technology, management and engagement with multiple actors. Results show that in water utilities direct performance regulation and regula-tion that raises awareness of a 'performance' gap as a 'problem' can stimulate innovation, but only under particular organisational, natural physical and regulatory conditions. The integrated framework also suggests that while flexible or framework legislation (e.g. Water Framework Directive) does not stimulate innovation in itself, it has shaped the option spaces and characteristics of innovations selected towards source control instead of technical end-of-pipe solutions.
... The authors of such studies have argued that the " willingness (or disposition) but also the ability (or capability) in different constituencies (individual, communities, organisations and agencies) to absorb, accept and utilize innovation options " is critical to the successful design and implementation of both water policy instruments (Jeffrey and Seaton 2004), and water technologies characteristic of integrated management approaches such a re-use and recycling (Jeffrey and Jefferson 2003; Brown and Clarke 2006). Moving to the scale of the organisational population, Spiller et al. (2009) have begun to shed light on how the geographical and physical characteristics of water and sewerage company territory influences the choice responses to legislative change such as the WFD. In doing so they have begun to demonstrate that utility specific contextual factors remain important to understanding innovation in water and wastewater, and that physical and engineering factors have enabling and constraining roles in change processes alongside the institutional. ...
Improving the stimulation and management of innovation by water utilities is a key mechanism through which the challenges of securing sustainable water and wastewater services will be achieved. This paper describes the process of adopting source control interventions (SCIs) by water and sewerage companies (WaSCs) in England and Wales. SCIs can be defined as efforts by water suppliers to control agricultural pollution where it arises. To investigate differences in the extent to which SCIs have and are being adopted across all ten WaSCs in England and Wales, Rogers’ five stage innovation model is used to structure and interpret results from a series of semi-structured interviews with raw water quality and catchment management personnel. Results suggest that to promote SCI innovation by WaSCs, regulation should be designed in two interdependent ways. First, regulation must generate awareness of a performance gap so as to set an agenda for change and initiate innovation. This can be achieved either through direct regulation or regulation which raises the awareness of an organisations performance gap, for example through additional monitoring. Simultaneously, regulation needs to create possibilities for implementation of innovation through enabling WaSCs to utilise SCIs where appropriate. Evidence from the research suggests that appropriate intermediary organisations can assist in this process by providing a resource of relevant and local knowledge and data. Future research should seek to characterise the factors affecting each stage in the WaSC innovation process both to confirm the conclusions of this study and to reveal more detail about various influences on innovation outcomes.
