RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Assessing the resilience of water and wastewater utilities: A multi-criteria approach for Chile
A1 Maziotis, Alexandros
A1 Molinos Senante, María
K1 Operational resilience
K1 Composite indicator
K1 Water supply
K1 Wastewater
K1 Natural hazards
K1 Performance
K1 3308 Ingeniería y Tecnología del Medio Ambiente
AB Ensuring the operational resilience of water and wastewater utilities (WWUs) is critical for safeguarding publichealth, environmental sustainability, and service continuity in the face of natural and human-induced hazards.This study develops an innovative Operational Resilience Index (ORI) to comprehensively assess WWU opera-tional resilience from a regulatory perspective. The ORI integrates multiple resilience indicators across three keydimensions—service performance, asset management, and water security—using a Multi-Criteria DecisionAnalysis (MCDA) approach, incorporating expert and stakeholder preferences through the Best-Worst Method(BWM). The methodology is applied to 29 WWUs in Chile, a country with high exposure to natural disasters. Theweights assigned to resilience indicators indicate a preference for short-term service performance over long-terminfrastructure resilience. The estimated ORI values range from 0.524 to 0.808, with the maximum achievablescore being 1.000. It was evidenced that asset management represents the most critical area for improvement,indicating a need for regulatory incentives to promote infrastructure renewal. While no statistically significantdifferences in ORI scores were found based on WWU ownership structure (public, private, or concessioned),concessioned WWUs demonstrated statistically superior performance in asset management (p-value = 0.012),underscoring the need for targeted regulatory measures to strengthen this dimension in other ownership modelsThe ORI provides a systematic benchmarking tool for regulators, enabling resilience-based performance as-sessments and targeted policy interventions.
PB Elsevier
SN 0038-0121
YR 2025
FD 2025
LK https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/79697
UL https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/79697
LA eng
NO Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, 2025, vol. 102, p. 102340
NO Producción Científica
DS UVaDOC
RD 15-nov-2025