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Recently, wastewater reuse is receiving a great deal of focus and interest among planners and decision makers in the West Bank, Palestine. This interest in wastewater reuse is motivated by the shortage in water resources accessibility due to the unstable political situation in the region. Much of the recent dispute that took place at the national level and among the stakeholders and planners revolved around issues related to the priorities of wastewater reuse in terms of location implementation of reuse schemes. The paper illustrates the conceptual framework for developing such a map and elaborates on the factors that dictate map development. Examples of such factors are discussed. The paper’s outcomes show that the development of the map requires a multidisciplinary expertise and the work necessitates the collaboration among experts from different fields.

This paper presents a method for prioritizing watersheds for potential wastewater reuse schemes. The method relies on multi-criteria decision analysis using the IOC in order to figure out the suitability of watersheds for the wastewater reuse. Although the paper is based on a conceptual illustration of the suitability index, however, the method needs to be implemented on a real case study to verify its practicality. One of the challenges in utilizing the suitability concept is its reliance on a multitude of parameters (criteria). Many of these parameters are difficult to quantify because of the very nature of these parameters. For example, it might be difficult to quantify numerically the social criterion or to find a geographic variability in the religious criterion. The IOC method in multi-criteria decision analysis is a straightforward and efficient method for decision analysis and allows for ranking the watersheds based on the preference order of the decision criteria.