Social sustainability assessment of groundwater resources: A case study of Hanoi, Vietnam

Abstract Groundwater plays a key role in public water supplies around the world, and consideration of the social dimension is a key issue in sustainable groundwater management. In Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, the situation of groundwater resources is disastrous because the quality has seriously degraded recently. Hence, in this study, a social sustainability assessment framework of groundwater resources with a focus on Hanoi is proposed for the first time. An analytical hierarchy process (AHP) approach was used to generate the main components (aspects and indicators) of this framework, which has been considered one of the most challenging tasks in AHP sustainability applications. To overcome these challenging tasks, we carefully reviewed and explored the current problems of Hanoi groundwater resources to propose 3 main aspects (quantity, quality, and management) and appropriately selected their 13 sustainability indicators for this target area. We introduce a sustainability index function (SIF) for indicators to clarify the relationship between each indicator value and its sustainability index. Furthermore, we consider both the conventional linear relationship, as it is usually developed in the literature, as well as a non-linear SIF to arrive at a reasonable sustainability assessment. For the Hanoi case study, the sustainability indices obtained using a combined linear and non-linear SIF method reflect the current problems well, that is, the social sustainability assessment is closer to reality. The sustainability indices of the quantity, quality, and management aspects of the groundwater were appropriately assessed as good, poor, and acceptable, respectively, resulting in Hanoi being rated at the acceptable level in the final social sustainability assessment. This result reveals that the population of Hanoi is satisfied with the quantity of water but dissatisfied with its current poor quality and its relatively high price.