“To overcome the looming water challenges facing our planet and to achieve efficient water and wastewater services, we will need to develop new infrastructure designed using truly different paradigms. Modifications to our current systems will not be enough.”
The combined effects of unabated population growth, rising incomes, urbanisation and climate change have set the stage for the challenge of the 21st century - providing food, water and energy for rapidly growing planet. Fixed or diminished sources of water supply and the requirement to reduce pollution together with rising health and environmental standards will drive the paradigm shift for the water sector.
“Fundamentally, this means that new systems will need to include infrastructure for the repeat use and reuse of water; technology to recover nutrients from wastewater as well as new energy recovery/production systems”
IWA is launching its Cities of the Future Programme today at Stockholm Water Week.
“The goal for the programme is to find new approaches to old problems. For example, can we build water and wastewater systems in a manner that achieves resource efficiencies and at the same time, greatly reduce costs, largely through a rethought network design and a modular approach to build-out of the system?”, asks Mr Reiter.
“New technologies, whether they take the form of providing water service in semi-centralized clusters, mixed centralized-decentralized system or through progressive re-modeling of existing systems, will all require a fundamentally different relationship between the design of water systems and the design of cities.”
“To accomplish much of this agenda, Cities of the Future intends to inspire water system and city planners to jointly optimise urban design objectives around water, energy, and other environmental resources.”, Mr Reiter concludes.
Through the IWA Cities of the Future program, focusing on water security for the world's cities and how the design of cities - and the water treatment and delivery systems that serve them - the opportunity exists to harmonise and re-engineer these systems to minimize the use of scarce natural resources and increase the coverage of water and sanitation in lower and middle income countries.#