Abstract
Drinking water system maintenance faces rising energy, carbon, and water pressures, but integrated optimization strategies remain limited. Here we developed an energy-carbon-water nexus framework to quantify the resource efficiency gains of replacing conventional unidirectional flushing with air scouring, ice pigging, and their combined use across pipe, city, and regional scales. At the pipe scale, air scouring and ice pigging reduced energy use by 12%-68%, carbon footprint by 7%-84%, and water use by 56%-91% relative to unidirectional flushing. When scaled to 258,000 km of pipelines across 50 cities and regions, emerging technologies reduced annual energy use by 4.40×107-4.80×107 kWh, carbon emissions by 2.26×108-7.56×108 kg CO2, and water use by 4.12×107-6.12×107 m3. Prioritizing large-diameter pipes yielded resource and economic cost savings equivalent to 4-19 years of unidirectional flushing over a 30-year transition. These findings reveal substantial opportunities to improve resource efficiency in water infrastructure maintenance and advance sustainable urban water systems.
Similar content being viewed by others
Acknowledgements
The research work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 72103022 S.W., 52470017 F.D., 72573020 S.W., 52293445 N.L.), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2023YFF0614500 T.Z.), the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. LR26E080004 F.D.), and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council – Strategic Topics Grant (No. STG2/P-705/24-R K. F.).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
About this article
Cite this article
Wang, S., Huang, Y., Shao, Y. et al. Unlocking energy-carbon-water synergies in global water supply system maintenance. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-72300-3
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-72300-3
