Desarrollo de un indicador de resiliencia desde el nexo Agua-Energía-Alimentos para viviendas ubicadas en Quito, Ecuador

Abstract

This Master’s Thesis focuses on the development of a quantitative methodology to evaluate residential resilience from the water-energy-food nexus in dwellings located in Quito, Ecuador. To achieve this objective, a functional model is proposed, considering the dwelling as a basic unit of the urban system and analysing its capacity to maintain critical activities during scenarios of resource interruption or restriction. The model is conceived as a comparative assessment tool, organised into three subsystems: water, energy and food. The main factors considered in the analysis are resource availability, demand adjusted by changes in use, functional tolerance, scenario duration, service levels and the resilience mechanisms present in the dwelling. These mechanisms include accumulation, diversification, recirculation and adaptation of use practices. The methodology was computationally implemented in Python and applied to a resilient case-study dwelling and a conventional baseline dwelling, both located in Quito and evaluated under equivalent conditions of occupancy, location and disturbance. Based on the moderate compound crisis scenario, the results show that the case-study dwelling reaches a final resilience indicator of 0.947, compared to 0.723 for the baseline dwelling. This difference is mainly explained by the combined contribution of backup systems, alternative sources, recovery of internal flows and changes in demand. The results show greater improvements in the food and energy subsystems, while the difference in water is smaller due to the effect of consumption reduction and prioritisation. It is concluded that residential resilience does not depend only on the incorporation of sustainable technologies, but on the capacity to sustain critical functions through the integration of available resources, domestic infrastructure, adaptive mechanisms and functional continuity during crisis conditions. Keywords: residential resilience, water-energy-food nexus, sustainable dwelling, resilience indicator, functional continuity, resilience mechanisms, Quito, crisis scenarios