PhD Research

Framing the Research in the Llobregat Watershed

The Llobregat River is highly polluted and heavily managed.  Still, millions depend on surface water from the Llobregat for industrial, agricultural and domestic uses. Treating the highly polluted river for drinking water purposes exposes Barcelona residents to several public health risks that few are willing to discuss openly.  Water managers at the two treatment facilities have been dealing with industrial contaminants and mining residue dumped into the Llobregat for decades. Potash mines have been contaminating the Llobregat with salts since the 1930s, and industrial waste has been dumped in the river since the 1960s. This has not stopped the region from relying on the Llobregat River to meet its basic water needs. 

The private company Aigües de Barcelona (AGBAR) built the first water treatment plant on the shores of the Llobregat in the 1950’s.  Since then they have mixed treated surface water with high quality groundwater from the Llobregat Delta aquifer.  ABGAR built the water treatment facility in the lower segment of the river outside the city of Barcelona in the suburb of Sant Joan Despí.  This site has proven unfortunate because it is located downstream of major industries at the bottom of the watershed.  The surface water to ground water ratio at the AGBAR plant is usually around 50/50, and the average intake from the Llobregat is 3 cubic meters per second (m³/s).  During the dry season, the AGBAR facility frequently diverts the entire Llobregat River into the treatment plant.  However the river does not run dry because immediately after the diversion point, another pipe dumps industrial waste and treated wastewater into the riverbed. 

In the 1970’s the Catalan Government built a second water treatment plant upstream in the town of Abrera. This plant is managed by the public water agency Aigües Ter-Llobregat (ATLL) who is responsible for treating water from the Llobregat and Ter Rivers and then re-selling it to municipal providers. While the extraction point in Abrera is upstream of many industries, they too have considerable problems maintaining water quality.  

Both facilities use classic water treatment technology with large sedimentation ponds and sand filters.  They avoid disinfecting with chlorine as much as possible because it reacts with organic matter to produce carcinogenic trihalomethanes.  Instead, they disinfect with with ozone (O₃) and chlorine dioxide. Within the last decade, both treatment plants have installed activated carbon filters.  The carbon filters are expensive, and the maintenance consists of shipping them to large ovens in Italy where they burn off filtered material.  After every burning, the damaged carbon must be replaced with new material.  These maintenance expenses may be a critical component of a dissertation that tries to relate treatment costs with water quality. 

While the activated carbon filters brought considerable improvements in drinking water quality, the taste has remained poor. Both water treatment plants are now investing in advanced membrane technology that will remove additional contaminants, especially various salts compounds.  The Llobregat River becomes extraordinarily salty after it passes the potash mines in the towns of Sallent and Cardona. The salts in the Llobregat have plagued drinking water managers for decades and have been responsible for a consistently poor taste in Barcelona’s tap water. In the 1980’s, the Catalan government tried to mitigate salt contamination by diverting salt runoff from the mines into a long pipe that ran 100 kilometers from mines to the Mediterranean.  This pipe collects the salty stormwater runoff and to some degree, has reduced the river’s salinity.  However maintaining the pipe has been difficult and periodic breaks have released heavy salt loads onto fields destroying crops or into the river disrupting aquatic ecosystems. 

When I visited the water treatment plants, both were undergoing major construction to install the modern desalination technology.  It was odd to see desalination systems being installed in a freshwater ecosystem and I wondered if there was any precedent for this absurdity.  Both of these systems are costing millions of Euros.  The public agency ATLL is purchasing electrodialysis desalination equipment manufactured by General Electric, while downstream, the private firm AGBAR is investing in reverse osmosis.  Both systems are highly energy intensive and costly to maintain.  Nevertheless, AGBAR is a profit driven firm that would not have invested in desalination had the project not been deemed financial viable. At the same time, I suspect that these projects have been partially subsidized by the European Union or other government agencies, thereby reducing the investment burden. 

The investment in desalination shows that water managers in Catalonia are implementing an “end of pipe” solution to mitigate its environmental woes.  Instead of addressing the contamination at its source, water managers have chosen to make a huge investment in a new technology that is costly to purchase and maintain.  In this respect, they are moving in the opposite direction of water managers from New York City who have avoided expensive filtration by investing in watershed management upstream.  The case of New York City’s water supply is perhaps the most frequently cited example of intelligent water management because the protection of the Catskill watershed came at only a fraction of the cost of the planned filtration plant.  The financial savings have been estimated at USD $6 to $8 billion, plus $300 million per year in maintenance (Chichilnisky & Heal 1998, National Research Council 2000). While these avoided costs have erroneously been referred to as the “value” of the ecosystem services, it is nevertheless a good example of a successful strategy that protects ecosystems and improves water management. 

Initially I was discouraged to learn about the magnitude of the investment in desalination along the shores of the Llobregat.  Had I began my dissertation five years ago, I probably could have made a strong case in favor of river restoration at its source, mirroring the experience from New York City, and potentially help redirect the millions invested in desalination into watershed management instead. So now that this investment is underway, are there no longer economic arguments in favor of river restoration?  Is the concept of ecosystem services only useful for averting infrastructure investments?  How can the notion of ecosystem services still be applied in the Llobregat watershed? 

My interviews with river managers in Spain made it clear that they do not need a dissertation to inform them that the Llobregat River is polluted. Nor are they interested in a dissertation about river restoration methods – for the most part, they have the capacity to restore geomorphology and improve wastewater treatment.  However river managers did express interest in studies that could strengthen linkages between restoration activities upstream and water users downstream.  If river managers had more evidence that restoration investments in the upper parts of the watershed could produce tangible benefits for water users throughout the river’s course, this evidence could refocus attention away from the “end of pipe” approaches and encourage restoration efforts in the upper parts of the watershed. 

The questions posed by water managers in Spain fit nicely into a broader discussion in the academic literature on ecosystem services. 

 
Academic Context: Ecosystem Services

People and cities depend on the goods and services produced by our planet’s ecosystems.  This dependent relationship between human well-being and the biophysical world is eloquently encapsulated by the relatively new notion of ecosystem services. The food we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we drink all derive from ecosystem processes. However our dependence on these ecosystems has not prevented us from stressing them to the point where we have reduced their capacity to meet our needs (MA 2003). To maintain our valuable ecosystem services intact we must improve our management and decision making. The ecosystem services framework promises to generate the interdisciplinary tools of the future that can meet this challenge. This approach is quintessentially interdisciplinary as it weaves together the physical, biological, and social sciences into a framework for decision-making.  The successful integration of these fields into a coherent and practical framework has the potential to transform environmental policy at all scales. 

Proponents of ecosystem services have argued that this framework offers the most promising way forward for the field of conservation biology (Armsworth et al. 2007). Protecting our life support systems has also resonated with advocates for the global poor (Sachs & Reid 2006).  Major research institutions, conservation organizations, foundations and the private sector are investing in advanced research on ecosystem services.  Stanford University has selected this topic as a core area of research.  Consistent with this objective, the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford has teamed up with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and The Nature Conservancy (TNC), to create the Natural Capital Projectwww.naturalcapitalproject.org – a bold new initiative that brings together leading intellectuals and conservation practitioners to create new decision making tools for ecosystem managers.  Millions of dollars are being invested in this initiative (pers. com. P. Kareiva, 2007). These groups are gambling that a breakthrough in ecosystem services research will open new avenues for solving sustainability challenges. The vast potential of this field has not escaped attention of the popular media (Montenegro 2008). Ecosystem services research promises to find win-win solutions that have a broad appeal to government leaders, business owners, and the public at large. New ecosystem management approaches that weave together the natural and social sciences could transform conservation biology, land-use planning and environmental policy. 

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) defines ecosystem services as the benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems (MA 2003).  This concise definition has become the standard for the field.  In fact, the MA has become the benchmark document for nearly every study grappling with ecosystem services.  A coalition of United Nations agencies spearheaded the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment by bringing together international experts in the natural and social sciences. This team was asked to synthesize the existing scientific information on the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being. Their report targeted global leaders who manage ecosystems and look after the well being of their constituents (Carpenter et al. 2006). In the process of conducting this assessment, the MA organized our understanding of ecosystem services and mapped out the health of our planet. With regular updates scheduled every 5 to 10 years, the MA process has been modeled after the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (MA 2003). 

 

Applying the ecosystem services framework in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region

The ecosystem services framework may provide a useful entry point for addressing competing water needs in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region.  In the spring of 2008 the Barcelona Metropolitan Region confronted its worst droughts in recent history.  The Catalan Government implemented severe water restrictions and initiated emergency plans including the importation of desalinated water on boats from southern Spain.  Authorities were concerned that water restrictions would exacerbate citizen discontent and destabilize a weak economy dependent on tourism revenue. At the same time, the European Union has mandated watershed restoration plans to obtain “good ecological status” in all water bodies including rivers (ACA 2006). The Catalan government is under pressure to meet the needs of its residents without further degrading riparian ecosystems. 

Can ecosystem services help uncover win-win solutions to address Catalonia’s water problems? I begin my research open with the possibility that the ecosystem services framework is significantly more limited than advocates make it out to be. At least the literature on hydrologic services makes it clear that tradeoffs will be inevitable (Brauman et al. 2007). Furthermore, the links between water attributes such as quantity, quality, timing, and location are not easily translated into numerical values for policy makers.  Perhaps surface water quality provides one of the clearest links between restoring “good ecological status” and human well-being. 

Another more complex connection between ecosystem functions and human well-being relates land use, water quality and water treatment.  The urbanization of a watershed with impervious surfaces is closely related to diminished water quality (Moglen & Kim 2007).  This creates an incentive for water users, treatment managers and service providers to minimize development impacts on the hydrologic cycle. Are water users, treatment managers and service providers willing to pay for land conservation to protect their watershed and reduce (or stabilize) water treatment expenses?  A study on this question with water service providers in California found that land was too expensive to offset the ecosystem benefits gained from protection (Thompson 2007). They concluded that for conservation to make financial sense, the hydrologic services alone are not enough.  To make a convincing case for land conservation, the ecosystem services will need to be bundled.  Attempts to calculate the bundled value of ecosystem services across a landscape are still preliminary. Only recently have researchers used this approach to identify and prioritize areas for conservation (Chan et. al 2006; Naidoo & Ricketts 2006).  Indeed, much of the discussion on ecosystem services has been in a conservation context.  The degraded conditions of the Llobregat watershed will permit an exploration of the utility of the ecosystem services concept in a restorationcontext. Are the ecosystem services sufficient to merit their restoration? 

Preliminary Research Question: Is River Restoration Profitable?

Can river restoration be sold as an investment for water users?  In other words, can restoration activities be justified by a reduction in water management costs downstream? Initially, I considered studying the financial costs of all water users downstream but I may need to focus on water treatment facilities since they are the largest water user with the highest expenditures. 

 To answer my question, I must understand the relationship between the water quality and treatment cost (Fig. 1).  If one could establish this relationship, one might find that a marginal improvement in water quality could lead to significant reduction in treatment costs. Since the Llobregat is highly polluted (low water quality), my initial assumption is that the treatment facilities are probably operating on the higher and more expensive end of this relationship.

Of course, specifying the relationship between water quality and treatment cost will not be easy.  There are several obstacles.  For example, there might be thresholds associated with certain contaminants which would create a step function. Another challenge will be defining “water quality” or “water pollution”.  Both terms are comprised of many variables, often in different units. Similarly, cost data may fluctuate over time for reasons independent of water quality. 

 Studies have found that cleaner surface water can reduce treatment costs, although it is unclear by how much. One study in Texas found that a 1 percent increase in turbidity was associated with increased chemical cost of 0.25%.  Furthermore, when comparing the presence or absence of a contamination index, the presence of contamination increased the chemical cost of water treatment an additional USD $20 to a total of USD $95 per million gallons (3,785 m3) (Dearborn 1998). More information on the total cost of water treatment would be necessary to assess the relative magnitude of these values. Also, one cannot expect to find the same level of savings as in the well known example of New York City drinking water because most urban areas already have constructed water filtration systems (Thompson 2007). 

  

My research follows the following principles:
1. Interdisciplinarity
My research will integrate various fields such as ecology, economics, planning, and hydrology with the purpose of solving an interdisciplinary environmental problem.
2. Research Tools and Methods
Research tools and methods will allow me to answer questions and solve problems. I look forward to specializing in those tools and methods that are relevant to answering questions at my research site.
3. Apprenticeship
Great teachers have inspired my most rewarding learning experiences. I look forward to developing strong relationships with my thesis advisors.
4. Professional Training
Upon completing my dissertation, I would like to apply these research skills in government, a non-profit organization or international agency.
5. Applied Research
My research will be driven by the questions needing attention at the research site. This approach implies close contact with practitioners in the area. My research will interact with these local actors and improve through their feedback.

Barcelona Field Report 2007-08
This December 2007 and January 2008 I interviewed planners, water resource managers, and academics in the Barcelona metropolitan region to assess the possibility of conducting PhD research there. I introduced myself as a first year PhD student at the University of Illinois exploring research topics and seeking to understand the pressing water management issues. This report summarizes what I found.

Background on Spanish Water Politics, Urban Growth & the Drought of 2007-08
North eastern Spain has an arid Mediterranean climate, with an annual rainfall of approximately 800 mm. Most water demand is located along the Mediterranean coast or in the Barcelona Metropolitan Region. Inland, there is significant agricultural water use in the province of Lleida. Urban water demand is met through a reservoir system in the Pyrenees Mountains. Drinking water is also pumped from aquifers and rivers.

In the mid 1990’s, Spain realized that water scarcity could limit economic growth. Water scarcity was especially acute in coastal tourist destinations and in the agriculturally productive south-east (Murcia, Almería and Valencia). To meet projected water demand, center-right political parties proposed a major water diversion project from the “water rich” North to the “water scarce” South and coast. This “engineering approach” to resolving water scarcity sought to increasing water supply through the construction of dams and infrastructure (Arrojo 2003). The water management strategy based on increasing supply is capital intensive and ignores the associated environmental costs of removing freshwater from riparian ecosystems. The central feature of Spain’s National Hydrologic Plan was the diversion of 1,050 hm3 from the Ebro River to satisfy water demand in agricultural, urban and tourism sectors along the Mediterranean Coast. This proposal catalyzed resistance from towns along the lower reaches of the Ebro, especially in communities dependent on a healthy Ebro Delta, at the southern tip of Catalonia. Massive protests in Barcelona and elsewhere succeeded in pressuring the European Union to retire its support for the project. Eventually, the water transfer project was cancelled when the left leaning Socialist Party replaced the conservative Popular Party in the 2004 general elections.

Part of the Ebro water diversion was to be pumped to Barcelona. The Catalan’s government response to the cancellation of the Ebro Diversion plan was a combination of demand management (educational campaigns, distribution of water saving technologies, re-use) and desalinization (supply increase). The Catalan government chartered the construction of two new desalinization plants, and a major expansion of the existing desalinization plant in the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona. The desalinization plant in the Llobregat Delta, south of Barcelona, is the largest in Europe (200,000 m3 per day) and has a cost of over $200 million (pers com. Joan Canals).

As of January 2008, the autonomous community of Catalonia in north eastern Spain is facing a severe drought. Reservoirs are below 30% capacity and domestic water restrictions will go into effect in late March or early April if heavy rains do not come (Bracero & Magallón 2007). Government agencies are concerned that water restrictions will exacerbate existing citizen discontent.

Throughout 2007, the Barcelona Metropolitan Region has suffered from infrastructure fallouts associated with poor growth management. Trains have ground to a halt -- requiring alternative bus services on major routes (40 km); the electrical grid left Barcelona in the dark for over a day in July 2007; and both the highway system and the airports have surpassed their capacity – causing collapse and user delays. This milieu of infrastructure related problems has dominated the political debate and propelled “infrastructure issues” to become the number one issue of concern for Catalan citizens. Recent polls have shown “infrastructure issues” have surpassed other issues, such as unemployment, immigration, and affordable housing, as the most pressing issue needing government attention.

The Catalan government fears that mandatory water restrictions will incite further outrage. Now more than ever, the government wants to avoid having “poor water management” be added to the long list of infrastructure failures. General elections for the Spanish Federal Government are scheduled for March 9th 2008, and the ruling Socialist Party has a slim majority. While elections in Catalonia are not until 2011, the Catalan Socialist Party rules the Catalan Government (Generalitat), and the infrastructure problems may motivate voters to remove incumbents.

The infrastructure problems are the result of (1) rapid economic growth associated with joining the European economy and low European interest rates, (2) a boom in number visitors to Barcelona, in part because of low-cost air travel, (3) unplanned urbanization and sprawl, and (4) a lack of investment and maintenance in basic infrastructure. Economic growth has also been accompanied by new trends in urbanization, as residents are attracted to lower density, single family homes instead of the traditional compact apartment buildings. Lower density homes also have higher water use, especially those with lawns and swimming pools (Saurí 2003). Thus the new urban trends are exacerbating water shortages. Developers who build residential units with a high water demand are ignoring the reality of water shortages in Catalonia.

As of January 2008, reservoirs in Catalonia are at 26% of their capacity. This translates to a total of 181 hm3, while their maximum capacity is 694 hm3. Furthermore, current water storage is only half of normal for this time of year (Winterhalder 2008).

The new Llobregat desalinization plant won’t be operational until late 2008 or early 2009, so between now and then the Generalitat is proposing several measures to address the drought. First, they are re-opening abandoned wells in the Barcelona metropolitan region. Ironically, the shortage of water in the reservoirs contrasts with the excess of groundwater under the streets of Barcelona. Reduced industrial water use in the Llobregat industrial corridor has caused groundwater levels to rise in the Barcelona aquifer (Estevan & Prat 2006). Drainage systems under the city of Barcelona are pumping more water from the underground network of tunnels and Metro lines that service the city. This water is pumped into their wastewater treatment system, and as a result, this increases wastewater treatment costs. The challenge is to simultaneously help alleviate the drought and reduce treatment costs by using the groundwater in Barcelona.

Second, the Generalitat is expanding its public communication campaign to promote water saving habits. Television and radio announcements remind water users that, “Before, to have water we turned the faucet on. Now, to have water, we turn the faucet off.” On the weekend of January 19-20th, 2008, water saving technologies for easy installment in the home were distributed free of cost through the major newspapers. 650,000 units were distributed, and it is expected that water savings can reach 7% (La Vanguardia 2008).

Finally, the most drastic measure includes the importation of freshwater from southern Spain and France in large ships. In January 2008 the Port of Barcelona announced that they had begun construction work to allow the water to be unloaded from the ships and connected to the water network (Bordas & Muñoz 2008). The ships will carry 10 hectometers of desalinized water per month from desalinization plants that have excess capacity elsewhere along the Mediterranean. This increased supply may postpone water restrictions until June 2008. The political opposition has criticized the Generalitat’s water management strategy, and suggested that the water transfer from the Ebro River would have avoided this crisis (Bracero 2007, La Vanguardia 2008b).

Research Issues
The conversations in Barcelona were centered on existing environmental problems, each of which may provide fertile ground for PhD research. These topics are outlined below, in addition to a few preliminary research questions.

1. Freshwater Management

1.1. Water demand management
Environmental advocates support demand management policies over supply increases to met future water needs. The geographer, David Saurí, has published a few pieces on the links between urban development and water demand. I will read his work to see what research agenda he proposes.  How have different land use policies or growth policies impacted domestic water use?

1.1.1. Gray water
Intuitively, using potable water for flushing toilets is a poor use of a scarce and costly resource. An economist would point out that this is an economic inefficiency. Ideally, water should not be treated to a quality higher than necessary. What are the obstacles to implementing gray water systems on a larger scale? What is being done in Catalonia, and what needs to be done to mainstream gray water systems?

1.1.2. Municipal Gray water policy
Municipal governments require that developers comply with a series of green building standards to obtain building permits. They use a point system that includes energy, water and other green building issues. In practice, developers meet the green building standards by implementing energy efficiency technology. How successful has this system been? What are other links between domestic water use and municipal regulations?

1.2. Re-use policy
Treated wastewater is used for agriculture in the Llobregat Delta south of Barcelona. Re-use is a priority for the Catalan Water Agency. Are there other opportunities for re-use? Catalonia has installed hundreds of small scale waste water treatment plants in the last 15 years. Most of these are in small towns. Large firms also have their own wastewater treatment plants, which often use even more modern technology than the public wastewater treatment.

1.3. Water pricing and regulation
Research on this topic would build well on my background in environmental economics and public policy. The high fixed cost in the water bill makes it difficult to create water saving incentives in the billing structure. They also use block pricing, so consumption within a certain range is billed the same. Prices are regulated through a regulatory committee, and negotiated with water service providers, which are private, public and everything in between.

1.4. Water Trading and Banking
It was suggested that a large sum of water is used inefficiently in the agricultural sector, and that a water trading system between rural and urban areas could tremendously improve water use. California and Australia have implemented successful water trading schemes that serve as a model. However these water systems are physically not linked. Nevertheless, this issue is only beginning to be explored, and infrastructure investment to link watersheds would only be about 50 km worth of pipes.

1.5. Drought preparedness
What is their approach? How does it compare with elsewhere?

1.6. Desalinization
The engineer from the private firm Inima-OHL encouraged me to look into desalinization issues. He argued that this is the future of water resource management. Spain is betting on this technology to solve its water problems. A well reputed aquatic biologist belittled the potential environmental impacts of desalinization in the Mediterranean, arguing that the currents rapidly dilute the high concentrations of brine disposed into the sea.

The large Llobregat desalinization plant will be up and running within the next two years. Will that alleviate scarcity concerns and push water issues to the back burner? Given desalinization technology, do water scarcity issues simply boil down to a question of resolving the sustainable energy question? That is, is the future of resolving water scarcity issues really just a question of finding a sustainable energy source?

On the other hand, desalinated water is more expensive. How will these costs be distributed among users? Will people on the coast pay more for water than people inland? Politically, this sounds difficult to justify, especially in a market that is regulated, and for a service considered a basic right. However forcing inland water users to pay higher rates to subsidize coastal desalinization also seems politically distasteful. What is the pricing strategy for using the desalinated water? The concession agreement between the Catalan Water Agency and the desalinization firm should discuss this in the concession contract. What is their plan?

2. Watershed Management
2.1.Llobregat Salinization
The Llobregat is Catalonia’s largest river, and it stretches from the Pyrenees to the Mediterranean, just south-east of Barcelona. For centuries, Barcelona used the Llobregat valley as a communication corridor to the Catalan hinterland. Today, the Llobregat is filled with industrial uses, freeways, railways, and major urban infrastructure. Approximately 50 kilometers upstream, salt mines have heavily polluted the river. The salt intrudes the Llobregat both from the groundwater, due to flooded mines, as well as stormwater, since salt residue is left in the open air in mounds 500 m high. The salinization of the Llobregat River has been an issue that Catalans have been dealing with for decades. Part of Barcelona’s drinking water comes from the Llobregat, and the high salinity requires a water treatment process that leaves a poor taste. To address this, they have mixed Llobregat water with water from the neighboring Ter watershed.

Richard Forman identified the restoration of the Llobregat River valley as a priority for the City of Barcelona in his regional plan he drafted for the planning agency Barcelona Regional in 2004. Personal experience can attest that residents are marginalized from the river, there few public access points, and overall, the Llobregat is in a sorry state. I am attracted to the idea of adopting a river for my PhD research, because it would allow me to do field work. The thematic research topics described above would have a weaker field component.

2.2. Ebro River and Delta
Further south, along the souther border between Catalonia and Valencia, one finds Spain’s largest river: the Ebro. The watershed occupies 85,362 km2 (32,521 mi2), approximately the size of three New England States: Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. The Ebro is born in the Cantabrian Mountains at an elevation of 930 m. It meanders through forested areas until it reaches the drier lands of Aragon, and the arid Montenegro shrub lands. Along the way, 151 dams obstruct the Ebro’s path to the Mediterranean. These dams were built mostly between 1945 and 1974, and have flooded 40,300 hectares (Schoeller 2005). When the river reaches the Ebro Delta along the Mediterranean coast, it has traveled 910 km (577 mi). The Ebro Delta is considered an ecological jewel of the Mediterranean, and a priority wetland under the RAMSAR convention (Day and Maltby 2002).

The cancellation of the Ebro River Transfer has protected instream flows. Still, researchers predict that the Delta is doomed to disappear due to the lack of sediment flow and rising sea levels.

3. Stormwater Issues
Richard Forman and others consider stormwater to be a pending issue in Spain, since stormwater and sanitary water systems are combined. Combined sewer overflows regularly dump untreated sewage into rivers (Forman 2004). Traditional retention basins have been constructed to mitigate these overflows. Still, few interviewed were up to speed on more advanced stormwater management, and low impact development. This issue certainly has room for technology transfers.

4. Wastewater
In the last 10 years, the Catalan government has subsidized the construction of waste water treatment facilities throughout the region. Several of the treatment facilities have tertiary treatment, and many re-use the water for agricultural use. In the Llobregat Delta south of Barcelona, treated water is being pumped into the aquifer. This has the dual function of preventing aquifer salinization, and indirectly, facilitating water re-use since deep wells pump from the same source. I visited these pumps in a historic building converting into a Museum by the private water company, Aigües de Barcelona (AGBAR) who owns the water service concession for large part of the Barcelona Metropolitan region.

I wonder if the field of wastewater treatment is already a saturated field dominated by engineers. I have the same concern for desalinization.

INDIVIDUALS INTERVIEWED
So far, I am thankful to the individuals I interviewed for their help and insight: Josep Anton Acebillo, Oriol Nel.lo, Narcís Prat, David Suarí, Germà Bel, Enric Tello, Antoni Munné, Joan Canals, Didac Ferrer, Ignasi Puig, Jaume Freire, and Ricard Giné among others.

References
Arrojo Agudo, P. 2003. El Plan Hidrológico Nacional: Una cita frustrada con la historia. RBA Editorial. Barcelona, Spain.

Arroyo, Francesc. 2008. Cuatro desalinizadoras contra la sequía. El País: Cataluña. January 13th, 2008. pg 1.

Arroyo, Francesc. 2008. Los problemas del agua no se aligerarán sino que se acentuarán. El País: Cataluña. January 13th, 2008. pg 3.

Bracero, F. & Magallón E. 2007. Medidas Drásticas. El Ejecutivo admite cortes de agua si sigue la sequía. Viver section in La Vanguardia. December 19th, 2007. pgs 1-3.

Bracero, Francesc. 2007. CiU acusa a Baltasar de gastar poco en agua. Viver section in La Vanguardia. December 21st, 2007. pg 6.

Bordas, Jordi & Muñoz, Óscar. 2008. Barcos a Punto: AGBAR y el puerto de Barcelona ultiman el dispositivo para traer agua en buques cisterna. Viver section in La Vanguardia. January 10th, 2008. pgs 1-3.

Conferderación Hidrográfica del Ebro (CHE). 2007. www.chebro.es.

Day J. & Maltby, E. 2002. The Ebro Delta and the Spanish Nacional Hydrological Plan. A Commentary prepared for the Foundation for a New Water Culture. Available online at http://www.unizar.es/fnca.

Estevan, A. & N. Prat. 2006. Alternativas para la gestión del agua en Cataluña: Una visión desde la perspectiva de la nueva cultura del agua. Fundación Nueva Cultura del Agua. Zaragoza.

Forman, R. T. T. 2004. Mosaico territorial para la region metropolitana de Barcelona (Land Mosaic for the Greater Barcelona Region: Planning a Future). Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona.

Horne, A.J., Dracup J., Hanemann M., Rodriguez-Iturbe I.,Means E., Roth J.C. 2003. A Technical Review of the Spanish National Hydrological Plan (Ebro River Out-of-basin Diversion). Report for the Fundación Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Spain. Available online: http://www.unizar.es/fnca.

La Vanguardia. 2007. Una treintena de obras de emergencia para tratar de evitar los cortes. Viver section in La Vanguardia. December 19th, 2007. pg 3.

La Vanguardia. 2008. La Generalitat repartirá 650.000 dosificadores de agua para reducir el consumo. January 17th 2008.

La Vanguardia. 2008b. CiU y PPC critican a la decisión de traer agua en barcos de Almería. January 17th 2008.

Sandoval, Antonio. 2007. Girona no admite sufrir restricciones mientras cede caudal a Barcelona. Viver section in La Vanguardia. December 19th, 2007. pg 2.

Saurí, David. 2003. Lights and Shadows of Urban Water Demand Management: The Case of the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona. European Planning Studies. (11)3:229-243.

Schoeller, S. 2005. Determining instream flow, analysis of methods and their application to the river Ebro in Spain. Thesis. Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya.

Winterhalder, A. 2008. Embalses con sed. Viver section in La Vanguardia. January 10th, 2008. pg 3.