Analyzing the Significance of Influential Factors in Integrated Urban Water/Wastewater Management towards Sustainable Development: A Non-Parametric Tests Approach

Authors
Seyed Ebrahim Nazlabadi 1
Reza Maknoon 1
Mohammad Reza Alavi Moghaddam 1
Glen T. Daigger 2
1 Amirkabir University of Technology (AUT)
2 University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
Abstract
Present study aims to analyze the significance of factors affecting integrated urban water/wastewater management in line with achieving sustainable development, utilizing non-parametric tests. Non-parametric methods, due to their flexibility in dealing with non-normal and qualitative data, enable a more comprehensive analysis of the complex relationships between variables. This study systematically reviews international documents from the past eight decades in the field of sustainable development, adopting an integrated approach to examine the factors affecting various sectors of the urban water and wastewater cycle. Due to the non-normal nature of the data obtained from expert surveys based on a 9-point Likert scale, the non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis test was used to analyze the significance of differences. The findings of the study reveal that out of the 100 initially identified factors, 33 key factors across six domains including economic and technological (with the highest significance), political, socio-cultural, environmental, and legal play an influential role. Among these, 25 factors have an impact on the entire urban water and wastewater management cycle. The results of the Kruskal-Wallis test indicate statistically significant differences in the importance of the factors, revealing that these differences are substantial. However, the test does not specify between which particular factors these differences exist. However, it further highlights the critical need for simultaneous attention to both technical-economic and socio-legal dimensions in urban water and wastewater policy-making. This study provides a scientific framework for identifying and classifying influential factors, paving the way for future research to more precisely determine the hierarchy of these factors' importance.

Keywords

Subjects

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