Nature-based solutions for climate-resilient industrial wastewater management: A framework and semi-systematic synthesis
Paper Details
Nature-based solutions for climate-resilient industrial wastewater management: A framework and semi-systematic synthesis
Abstract
Industrial effluent treatment plants are still designed mainly for average flow, average load, reliable power, and stable rainfall. These assumptions are weakening in climate-exposed industrial regions. Heatwaves, intense rainfall, flooding, drought, salinity intrusion, and power disruption now disturb the hydraulic and biological conditions on which treatment depends. This review reframes nature-based solutions (NBS) for industrial wastewater as engineered ecological infrastructure for disturbed conditions, not as decorative green features or substitutes for essential treatment. It develops the Climate-Resilient Engineered Ecological Infrastructure (CREEI) framework, linking an external climate-stressor regime, an industrial wastewater system understood as a social-ecological-technological system, and an internal resilience cycle of resistance, absorption, recovery, and adaptation. A semi-systematic review of 55 peer-reviewed sources and five additional methodological sources is used to appraise six NBS options against six resilience functions. The synthesis shows that no single option is sufficient. Resilience comes from treatment trains that combine hydraulic reserve, conventional pretreatment, ecological polishing, adsorptive media, reuse storage, and catchment buffers. Recent evidence on compound extremes, microbial decline, clogging, drought-rewetting pulses, and sink-to-source reversal also shows why stable-condition removal efficiency can create an adaptation illusion. The article proposes a nested design and governance model for factory, industrial-park, and catchment scales. It is especially relevant for monsoonal deltaic industrial economies such as Bangladesh, where textile production pressure, weak drainage, land scarcity, water stress, and flood exposure coincide.
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