Intermittent water supply (IWS) is a widespread issue in many countries across South Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Various factors contribute to this intermittency, including natural, technical, and financial limitations, user behavior, and institutional challenges. Unfortunately, inconsistent access to water can have detrimental effects on public health, social equity, and sustainability in the long term.
In response, researchers and practitioners have been working to better understand IWS systems and explore ways to improve their operation, management, and transition to continuous water supply systems. This special issue features a collection of high-quality, peer-reviewed technical papers that address the challenges, opportunities, and potential solutions for IWS systems.
The topics covered include:
- The role of social, economic, technical, and institutional factors in the success or failure of IWS systems (Satpathy & Jha 2022)
- Methods and tools for modeling intermittent water supply systems (Sarisen et al. 2022; Sinha et al. 2023)
- IWS network management (Erickson et al. 2022; Ferrante et al. 2022)
- Water quality management (Rukshar et al. 2023)
The authors highlight the importance of these issues and propose innovative solutions to address the challenges faced by IWS systems.
Overall, this special issue makes a significant contribution to ongoing efforts to tackle the challenges of IWS systems, offering valuable insights for researchers and practitioners alike.