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Economic Sustainability Assessment of Groundwater Resources: Case Study of Hanoi, Vietnam



Author(s)

Nuong Thi Bui¹, Akira Kawamura¹, Hideo Amaguchi¹, Duong Du Bui², Ngoc Tu Truong³ and Hoang Nam Nguyen⁴

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DOI:10.17265/2162-5263/2017.12.003

1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tokyo Metropolitan University, Tokyo 192-0397, Japan
2. Water Resources Monitoring Department, National Center for Water Resources Planning and Investigation, Hanoi 100000, Vietnam
3. The State Key Laboratory of Bioreactor Engineering, East China University of Science & Technology, Shanghai 200237, China
4. Faculty of Urban and Environmental Natural Resource Economics & Management, National Economics University, Hanoi, Vietnam

The most useful indicators should be established, designed and customized based on local issues of a target area. In order to establish groundwater sustainability indicators for the Vietnam capital, Hanoi, in this study, the sustainability assessment framework of groundwater resources from an economic perspective is proposed for the first time with the focus of Hanoi current groundwater problems. An AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) approach is employed to generate the main components (aspects and indicators) of this framework, because development of composite indicators is considered to be a best approach for sustainability evaluation. To do this, the current problems of Hanoi groundwater resources were carefully reviewed and explored to propose three main aspects (quantity, quality and management) and appropriately construct their 9 MESIs (Macroeconomic Sustainability Indicators). As for the results, the sustainability indices of the quantity, quality and management aspects were appropriately assessed as good, excellent and good sustainability levels, respectively. As a result, the sustainability of Hanoi groundwater resources development is economically good, indicating that there has been a big effort to improve the groundwater sustainability from both sides, the local government and communities.

Groundwater, MESI, sustainability assessment, AHP, Hanoi.