Integrating water sensitive cities and circular economy principles to improve urban water management
Background
Our cities and towns face significant sustainability challenges:
- Rising urban water demand, driven largely by population growth and urbanisation
- Climate change reducing the reliability of rainfall-dependent water sources and increasing the frequency of extreme weather events
- A growing waste challenge
- A strong desire to improve local neighbourhood quality for public health and wellbeing, and ecological reasons.
To meet these challenges, we need to shift urban water management:
- FROM a linear model of TAKE → USE → DISPOSE
- TO a closed loop model that keeps resources in use for longer.
Two prominent frameworks guiding this continuing transformation are the water sensitive cities framework and the circular economy framework.
They are similar in what they want to achieve:
- They recognise the broader value of water.
- They reimagine water sector infrastructure
- They recognise the importance of natural systems and ecosystem services.
And importantly, together the 2 frameworks can complement each other and speed up the transformation of urban water management to address the challenges facing our cities.
This short brochure examines both frameworks and outlines opportunities to use both.
The CRCWSC has produced research, guidelines and
tools related to the following topics:
Integrated Urban Flood
Management
Climate change
mitigation
Community
engagement
Economics and
business case