Handbook of Water Harvesting and Conservation

5Single-Family Home and Building Rainwater Harvesting Systems

Duygu Erten^1,2

¹Department of Civil Engineering, İstanbul Medipol University, 34810 İstanbul, Turkey

²Vice Director of Climate Change Research Center, 34810 İstanbul, Turkey

5.1 Introduction

Among the most pressing environmental challenges facing us are extreme weather events and temperatures; accelerating biodiversity loss; pollution of air, soil, and water; failures of climate-change mitigation and adaptation; and transition risks as we move to a low-carbon future. Water demand issues and climate change risks are happening here and right now. This societal risk has interconnectedness to all environmental risks and even to involuntary migration.

The negative impacts of climate change on freshwater systems will most likely outweigh its benefits. Current projections show that crucial changes in the temporal and spatial distributing of water resources and the frequency and intensity of water-related disasters rise significantly with increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Exploitation of new data sources, better models, and more powerful data analysis methods, as well as the design of adaptive management strategies, can help respond effectively to changing and uncertain conditions (IPCC 2007).

Water is an important factor of production, contributing both directly and indirectly to economic activity across all sectors and regions of the global economy. Water scarcity may therefore go beyond having important consequences ...