Water quality standards across the world are being re-written to promote healthier ecosystems, ensure safe potable water sources, increased biodiversity, and enhanced ecological functions. Treatment wetlands are used for treating a variety of pollutant waters, including municipal wastewater, agricultural and urban runoff, industrial effluents, and combined sewer overflows, among others. Treatment wetlands are particularly well-suited for sustainable water management because they can cope with variable influent loads, can be constructed of local materials, have low operations and maintenance requirements compared to other treatment technologies, and they can provide additional ecosystem services. The technology has been successfully implemented in both developed and developing countries. The first IWA Scientific and Technical Report (STR) on Wetland Technology was published in 2000. With the exponential development of the technology since then, the generation of a new STR was facilitated by the IWA Task Group on Mainstreaming Wetland Technology. This STR was conceptualized and written by leading experts in the field. The new report presents the latest technology applications within an innovative planning framework of multi-purpose wetland design. It also includes practical design information collected from over twenty years of experience from practitioners and academics, covering experiments at laboratory and pilot-scale up to full-scale applications. Scientific and Technical Report No.27

The ebook edition of this title is freely available as an Open Access text. Treatment Wetlands is the seventh volume in the Biological Wastewater Treatment series, which gives a state-of-the-art presentation of the science and technology of sewage treatment. The major variants of wetland systems are covered in this volume, namely: (i) horizontal flow wetlands; (ii) vertical flow wetlands; (iii) French vertical flow wetlands; (iv) intensified wetlands; (v) free water surface wetlands; (vi) other applications of treatment wetlands. The book presents in a clear and didactic way the main concepts, working principles, expected performance, design criteria, design examples, construction aspects and operational guidelines. The book has been written by an international team of top experts in the field of treatment wetlands.

The book addresses urban transformations towards sustainability in light of challenges of global urbanization processes and the consequences of global environmental change. The aim is to show that urban transformations only succeed if both innovative scientific solutions and practice-oriented governance approaches are developed. This assumption is addressed by providing theoretical insights and empirical evidence pointing particularly at 3 concepts or qualities which are determined here as being central for achieving urban sustainability: resource efficiency, quality of life and resilience. Urban case studies from several international research projects illustrate our conceptual approach of urban transformations towards sustainable development. Thus, the book reaches far beyond a mere additive description of single case studies. It incorporates the results of condensed synthesis, resulting from comparisons and evaluations. It provides, based on cross-cutting reflection of single cases and different scales and methods of analysis, general and transferable findings. They do not only consider the scientific sphere but deliberately go beyond it discussing transferability of knowledge into practice, governance options and the feasibility of policy strategies in order to pave the way for sustainable urban transformations to happen today and in the future.