Conclusions

Libya is one of the countries around the world that are under severe water stress. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) is one of the best practices to overcome the water scarcity; it involves collection and storage of rainwater locally through different technologies, for future use. The geospatial techniques and domains like the Google™ earth maps and software’s like ArcGIS are helping tools in the works where the entities of varied characteristics and tedious field works are involved. It is evident that from table 4 that the amount of water that can be harvested from the rooftops of both selected educational buildings is sufficient to overcome water scarcity in the study area. The total quantity of rainwater can be collected in the targeted schools is around 558,600 liters per year. For the estimated domestic demands (3,600,000 liters) the water harvested will provide a considerable contribution to the water demand, i.e. rainwater harvesting is the best alternative to address ever-growing water demand issues and concerns in the Tajoura area where all the buildings are of concrete roofs that have maximum collection efficiency (Table 3). It can be concluded from above findings that rainwater, if conserved and utilized using the rainwater harvesting technology, an important potential can be served and the percentages ranging from 16% of the total water demand to 47% of the basic water demand. Despite the rainfall in the study area occurs seasonally, no large storage capacity is required to hold enough water collected during rain events because it coincides with the school days. A planned approach is needed in order to fully utilize the potential of rainwater to adequately meet our water requirements. Hence, developing and encouraging the water harvesting systems is very needful. We have to catch water in every possible way and every possible place it falls.