Cities and Experimentation are Central to Water Sustainability

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Cities and Experimentation are Central to Water Sustainability

Bolstered by the SDGs framework, cities must open themselves up to becoming laboratories for urban water-policy reform.

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The age of water that is simultaneously cheap, abundant and clean is coming to an end.

While most of the world’s major cities were built where they could access stable water sources, overconsumption and climate change have darkened the urban water future. Rising sea levels and more-intense storms threaten both flooding and the contamination of drinking water on an even shorter timescale than expected due to land subsidence from pumping out too much groundwater.

Two global agreements in the past year do offer new collective strategies for dealing with these looming problems. The Paris Agreement finalized at the “COP 21” negotiations last December seeks to prevent the worst impacts of climate change by established commitments from countries to reduce their individual carbon emissions. In addition, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are designed to guide international anti-poverty and sustainability efforts over the next decade and a half.

The SDGs include 17 goals and 169 specific targets that could substantially improve prospects for global sustainability. Goal 6, for instance, aims to “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. In this, it expands upon the previous iteration of the SDGs, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which oversaw significant progress in drinking-water access globally. The notable difference on this issue between the MDGs and the SDGs is a new focus on moving toward sustainable water use even as a greater portion of the population gains access.

Urbanization is correlated with higher rates of water use per capita. As such, cities will be especially impacted by Goal 6 in addition to Goal 11, which explicitly calls for more-sustainable urban spaces. The SDGs came into effect this year.

At the moment, however, we are not on track to meet the water-related SDGs. Demand for water has grown at twice the rate of population growth for more than a century. If consumption continues at current rates, demand will be 40 percent greater than sustainable supply by 2030, the end date for the SDGs.

Cities can improve this gloomy picture, but it will require a concerted effort by civic leaders to make urban zones more sustainable. Here are four specific areas where cities could make a major contribution to achieving global water-sustainability goals.

5rUNYBG.jpgWaste as resource

Cities also will become more water efficient by reusing water and harvesting resources from wastewater.

Large cities have a unique opportunity in the scale of the waste they produce — in the case of New York City, for instance, over a billion gallons a day.

Traditionally, this wastewater is cleaned and released to surface water (rivers, lakes and seas), and the removed solids eventually end up in landfills. This is both a missed opportunity and an environmental problem.

Utilities must be encouraged to move away from “linear” treatment systems into increasingly circular ones that encourage various forms of reuse.

Some of the technology for wastewater reuse already is available. For example, solids removed from wastewater can be captured, sold and used as biogas to offset a treatment plant’s own energy use. This is being done by Chicago’s Metropolitan Water Reclamation District.

The practices that would make the biggest difference require serious effort by municipalities for implementation and change. It would be better, for example, not to purify water to drinking-water standards simply for use in toilets, industry and irrigation, or for cooling.

Making widespread reuse a reality also requires building expensive parallel piping and treatment systems. For instance, while we know that phosphorus, a limited resource, can be recaptured from waste to make fertilizer, it remains unclear whether this is economically feasible on a large scale.

At the moment, cutting-edge reuse schemes have shown up mainly where scarcity is a problem. Tel Aviv reuses 100 percent of its wastewater as irrigation. But real urban leadership must materialize in places where acute scarcity hasn’t yet forced the issue. Utilities must be given the ability to run pilot programmes for improving reuse efficiency with the understanding that some experimentation will be required to develop the next systems.

Some of the best opportunities for implementing reuse technology may be in the developing world, where heavy centralized infrastructure has yet to be built. Urban density creates waste density, and this larger scale holds the potential for making cost-effective waste-reuse schemes more possible.

Build an ethos

Ultimately, cities that lead on water sustainability must convince residents that it is worth investing in. The timescale of climate change is slow, and responding to it effectively requires leaders who are willing to sink political capital into changes that they know will not return benefits while they are in office.

The improvements discussed above are potentially expensive, as well. Mayors must build institutions that support integrated urban water management and make it a compelling public achievement.

Rotterdam in the Netherlands currently leads the way by making water sustainability a basic principle in civic design and a very visible part of its governance choices. The Dutch have a long history of dealing with an overabundance of water in their cities, portions of which are below sea level. The city’s chief resilience officer is tasked with implementing a long-term climate adaptation strategy that aims to create a city with public spaces, industry and infrastructure that are prepared for significant climate impacts.

Now we need similar efforts by other cities. Indeed, without such effort even by those that don’t face immediate existential threats from climate change, it is doubtful that we will meet the water and urban sustainability aspects of the SDGs globally.

Novel experiments in waste recovery and high environmental standards must be made a matter of civic pride. For example, Windhoek, Namibia, has become a model for this kind of conversion.

The city recycles 35 percent of its wastewater into potable drinking water and has insulated itself against the stress of persistent drought and a population that has doubled in the past 20 years. Initially sceptical citizens have come to see water recycling as a point of civic pride that has allowed the city to push its water-security efforts even further.

Political will remains the biggest obstacle to changes in urban water policy, both regulatory and technological. But cities hold the keys to meeting the water-related SDGs, as they are a pressure point. If those living in cities can be made to see water security as a shared civic responsibility rather than an entitlement that “someone else” takes care of, they will be more likely to take on the experimental task of urban water-policy reform.

At World Water Week in Stockholm this year, leading development experts were clear-eyed about these challenges. But as Henk Ovink, the Dutch special envoy for international water affairs, pleaded, “We must be ambitious and not wait for perfection to try new things.” If we require sure success before acting to meet the SDGs, civic leaders are unlikely to risk attempting it at all. Cities must open themselves up to becoming laboratories for sustainable development practices and lead the effort to build a resilient and increasingly resource stable environment.

Blog by Michael Tiboris

Read full article at: Citiscope

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