ICMM, 2017; Ulloa et al., 2022). Despite its potential, the implementation of shared water infrastructure faces significant challenges, including regulatory frameworks ill‑suited to multi‑user systems, complex financing arrangements, and the need for sustained coordination among public and private actors. Addressing these barriers requires collaborative planning approaches, integrated modelling tools, and a long‑term vision that recognises the often under‑valued strategic role of water infrastructure in enabling sustainable development in arid mining regions (Valero et al., 2025; Pagliero et al., 2024). This work aims to demonstrate the benefits of implementing shared water infrastructure through the application of a methodological framework developed by Pagliero et al., (2024). The proposed framework is specifically designed to support integrated, participatory, and spatially explicit decision-making in water-scarce regions characterised by competing demands and high levels of uncertainty. It combines hydrological, technical, economic, environmental, and social dimensions within a unified analytical structure, enabling the systematic evaluation of alternative water supply and infrastructure configurations at a regional scale. In this paper, the key components of the framework are presented, including its conceptual foundations, the criteria used to represent sustainability trade-offs, and its implementation through a computational decision-support tool. The tool enables the comparison of shared and projectbased infrastructure options under multiple development and climate scenarios, explicitly accounting for cumulative impacts, infrastructure interdependencies, and stakeholder priorities. An illustrative application example is provided for a mining-intensive arid context, demonstrating how the framework can inform strategic water planning, enhance transparency in infrastructure investment decisions, and support the transition towards more coordinated and sustainable water governance models. 2. METHODOLOGY The methodological approach adopted in this study follows the framework developed by Pagliero et al. 2024, designed to support the sustainable integration of desalinated seawater into regional water supply systems under conditions of water scarcity and competing demands (Figure 1). The framework is implemented as an iterative, stepwise process that links regional system characterisation, scenario analysis, spatial infrastructure planning, network optimisation, and stakeholder interpretation of results. Step 1 consists of defining the system boundaries and compiling a spatially explicit regional database that integrates water sources, demands, and existing or potential infrastructure assets, together with geographic layers describing topography and socio-environmental constraints relevant to infrastructure deployment. Stakeholder engagement is embedded at this stage to validate system representation and ensure that locally relevant conditions and priorities are reflected. Step 2 involves translating the regional system into a simplified planning representation based on nodes and connections, where nodes represent sources, demands, storage elements, and junctions, each characterised by capacity or demand attributes. Alternative development and climate scenarios are then defined to represent plausible future conditions in terms of demand growth, source availability, and planning constraints, allowing the system to be evaluated under uncertainty. Step 3 performs spatial layout optimisation using a least-cost path approach in a GIS environment. A cost surface is constructed to represent relative penalties for infrastructure placement, accounting for environmental and social sensitivities. Least-cost paths between node pairs are identified, generating a set of candidate pipeline routes with associated attributes such as length and elevation change.
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