Improving Wastewater Management for Sustainable Environmental Conditions: A Flexible Semantic Network-Based Approach

Anthropogenic activities represent indirect drivers that generate harmful direct factors, hindering wastewater management (WWM) and causing environmental damage. We analyze this as a process composed of causal relationships where indirect drivers (intangible harmful factors) generate tangible harmful factors. We model this multifactorial process with semantic networks, where the nodes represent intangible or tangible harmful factors, and the interactions between them with causal relationships represented by directed-arcs. We propose an approach that supports decision-making for improving WWM through semantic pathways that describe processes from intangible to tangible harmful factors. A significant advantage of these semantic pathways is their flexibility to modify their structure by adding and removing nodes and arcs, thus allowing for the updating of environmental knowledge. This method facilitates decision-making by providing viable and sustainable solutions to improve WWM performance in coastal tourist municipalities characterized by constant population growth that generates uncontrolled urban sprawl. We applied this approach to the case of the municipality of Acapulco, located on the Mexican Pacific coast. Viable solutions include the restoration of wastewater treatment plants, changes in agricultural practices, mangrove reforestation, and the development of sound urban plans. This methodology can be applied to coastal tourist areas with similar characteristics.