water Article Analysis of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Centralized and Decentralized Water Reclamation with Resource Recovery Strategies in Leh Town, Ladakh, India, and Potential for Their Reduction in Context of the Water–Energy–Food Nexus Mounia Lahmouri, Jörg E. Drewes and Daphne Gondhalekar * Chair of Urban Water Systems Engineering, Department of Civil, Geo and Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Munich, 80333 München, Germany;
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[email protected] (J.E.D.) * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 2 February 2019; Accepted: 10 April 2019; Published: 29 April 2019 Abstract: With the constant increase of population and urbanization worldwide, stress on water, energy, and food resources is growing. Climate change constitutes a source of vulnerability, raising the importance of implementing actions to mitigate it. Within this, the water and wastewater sector represents an important source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, during both the construction and operation phase. The scope of this study is to analyze the GHG emissions from the current and future water supply scheme, as well as to draw a comparison between possible water reclamation with resource recovery scenarios in the town Leh in India: a centralized scheme, a partly centralized combined with a decentralized scheme, and a household level approach. Precise values of emission factors, based on the IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories, previous studies, and Ecoinvent database, have been adopted to quantify the different emissions. Potential sources of reduction of GHG emissions through sludge and biogas utilization have been identified and quantified to seize their ability to mitigate the carbon footprint of the water and wastewater sector.