1. Flagship RRR Research
Objective: To increase the scale and viability of the safe and
productive reuse of water, nutrients, organic matter and energy
from domestic and agro-industrial waste streams.
Locations: Reuse cases are being analyzed in ca. 20 locations across
Asia, LAC, SSA, and MENA.
Outputs:
• Compendium of 50 promising (and fully analyzed) business cases
as well as emerging & potential business models for waste reuse.
• Sanitation Safety Plans for reuse risk assessment & mitigation for
the business models (WHO -led).
• Investment plans for the implementation of safe business models
in about 6 cities across the developing world.
Outcomes: More investments in RRR, Cost recovery in the sanitation
service chain, More resilient systems, Increased food safety.
2. Accompanying Action Research
Examples:
• Retrofitting ww treatment plants towards reuse.
• Testing natural treatment systems (RBF, MAR,
wetlands).
• Value addition to raw waste through blending,
composting, pelletizing to increase its safety
and marketability.
• Testing organic fertilizers in the field.
Donors: AfDB, EU, BMGF, others
3. International Public Goods
• Activities:
– Supporting curricula and global training events: UN-Water
(WHO, FAO, UNEP, UNU) is using our staff and publications for
e-learning and a series of 7 regional training workshops on safe
wastewater irrigation around the globe (aiming at participants
from 100 countries).
– Establishing a global database and modeling of wastewater
use; to be eventually linked to FAO.
– Supporting the 2012 edition of the USAID/ USEPA Wastewater
Reuse Guidelines (second most popular global guidelines).
• Outputs:
IPGs (UN-Water tool kit, UNU e-learning, Global
guidelines, Global databases; White Papers  Information SRP).
Science behind RRR:
• Development of sub-sector markets in the waste value chain via
business model development based on neoclassical economic
theory concepts such as theory of the firm, resource-based view
theory. We examine market constructs via principal-agent
models; market structure and dynamics of value networks and
their implications for sustainable business model creation.
• Assessment of social welfare improvement along the waste
value chain based on pareto-optimal conditions.
• Development and adoption of RRR business models under risk
and uncertainty through Markov chain applications.
• Valuation of externalities (i.e. market and non-market) based
on revealed and stated preference approaches.
Water for a food-secure world
Smart ICT, Household based RWH,
Green water credits (PES),
Spate irrigation
Service offer
for CRP5
projects ?
How to add a business perspective? How to sell a project to an investor in
development (private capital, IFAD, USAID, BMGF, AfDB, etc.)?
How to go to scale and support an Outcome ?
Three SRPs at the core of
Natural Resources Management
While the Rainfed and Irrigation SRPs aim at
maximizing the productive use of water, land and
nutrients for agriculture, …
RRR complements them by recovering used, wasted
or underutilized resources to close the nutrient and
water cycles or prevent methane generation in
support of critical ecosystem services.
In this way RRR supports strongly system resilience.
On basins
• Our activities, outputs and outcomes do in most
cases not use (biophysical) basin or landscape
boundaries as a useful unit.
• A catchment perspective (e.g. downstream
pollution) is relevant to maybe 25% of our work.
• We are using socio-economic units like distance
from markets to describe spatial boundaries in
our research, and mostly operate across the rural
- urban trajectory.