Assessment of the Sustainability of Water Resources Management: A Critical Review of the City Blueprint Approach

2016

Environ Dev Sustain

319

157

Cities play a prominent role in our economic development as more than 80 % of the gross world product (GWP) comes from cities. Only 600 urban areas with just 20 % of the world population generate 60 % of the GWP. Rapid urbanization, climate change, inadequate maintenance of water and wastewater infrastructures and poor solid waste management may lead to flooding, water scarcity, water pollution, adverse health effects and rehabilitation costs that may overwhelm the resilience of cities. These megatrends pose urgent challenges in cities as the cost of inaction is high. We present an overview about population growth, urbanization, water, waste, climate change, water governance and transitions. Against this background, we discuss the categorization of cities based on our baseline assessments, i.e. our City Blueprint research on 45 municipalities and regions predominantly in Europe. With this bias towards Europe in mind, the challenges can be discussed globally by clustering cities into distinct categories of sustainability and by providing additional data and information from global regions. We distinguish five categories of sustainability: (1) cities lacking basic water services, (2) wasteful cities, (3) water-efficient cities, (4) resource-efficient and adaptive cities and (5) water-wise cities. Many cities in Western Europe belong to categories 3 and 4. Some cities in Eastern Europe and the few cities we have assessed in Latin America, Asia and Africa can be categorized as cities lacking basic water services. Lack of water infrastructures or obsolete infrastructures, solid waste management and climate adaptation are priorities. It is concluded that cities require a long-term framing of their sectoral challenges into a proactive and coherent Urban Agenda to maximize the co-benefits of adaptation and to minimize the cost. Furthermore, regional platforms of cities are needed to enhance city-to-city learning and to improve governance capacities necessary to accelerate effective and efficient transitions towards water-wise cities. These learning alliances are needed as the time window to solve the global water governance crisis is narrow and rapidly closing. The water sector can play an important role but needs to reframe and refocus radically.

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Solid Waste and Watermentioning

confidence: 99%

The challenges of water, waste and climate change in cities

2016

Environ Dev Sustain

319

157

“…Based on constructive feedback from cities we have recently revised the CBF and the results will be published in this journal (Koop and Van Leeuwen 2015a).We now distinguish two separate frameworks, i.e., a Trends and Pressures Framework (TPF; Table 2) and a performance-oriented CBF (Table 3). The TPF provides a wider context that is supplementary to the CBF.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Stresses exerted on the world's water resources by the increasing demand from growing populations with changing consumption patterns, the detoriation of water quality by pollution and climate change are placing water increasingly higher on the international agenda (UNEP 2012;EC 2012;Hoekstra and Wiedman 2014;World Economic Forum 2014). These megatrends pose urgent water challenges, particularly in cities (Engel et al 2011;SIWI 2012;Chong 2014;MacDonald et al 2014; Koop and Van Leeuwen 2015a).…”

Section: The Challenges Of Urban Water Governancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Seven indicators have been added, i.e., secondary and tertiary wastewater treatment (WWT), operation cost recovery, green space and three indicators belonging to the category 'solid waste treatment'. Furthermore, the geometric aggregation method has been selected for the calculation of the BCI* because it emphasizes the integrative nature of IWRM by penalizing unbalanced indicator scores (Koop and Van Leeuwen 2015a). The BCI (arithmetic average of the old 24 indicators) and the BCI* have been calculated for the same 45 cities.…”

Section: The Improved City Blueprint Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Application of the Improved City Blueprint Framework in 45 Municipalities and Regions

2015

Water Resour Manage

Self Cite

Rapid urbanization, water pollution, climate change and inadequate maintenance of water and wastewater infrastructures in cities may lead to flooding, water scarcity, adverse health effects, and rehabilitation costs that may overwhelm the resilience of cities. Furthermore, Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) is hindered by water governance gaps. We have analyzed IWRM in 45 municipalities and regions divided over 27 countries using the improved City Blueprint® Framework (CBF). The CBF incorporates solely performance-oriented indicators that more accurately measure the city's own efforts and performances to improve its IWRM. We have also analyzed the trends and pressures (on which the city's IWRM has a negligible influence). The Trends and Pressure Framework (TPF) creates awareness of the most stressing topics that either hamper or, on the contrary, pose opportunity windows for IWRM. The improved Blue City Index (BCI*) and the Trends and Pressures Index (TPI; the arithmetic mean of all TPF indicators) have been compared with other city descriptors. The BCI* and TPI showed a significant and negative Pearson correlation (r=−0.83). This implies that cities with pressing needs to improve their IWRM also face the highest environmental, financial and/or social limitations. The BCI* and TPI correlate significantly with the ND-GAIN climate readiness index (r=0.86; r=−0.94), the environmental awareness index (r=0.85; r=−0.85), the European green city index (r=0.86; r=−0.85) and various World Bank governance indicators. Based on a hierarchical clustering of the 45 municipalities and regions, 5 different levels of sustainability of urban IWRM could be distinguished, i.e., (1) cities lacking basic water services, (2) wasteful cities, (3) water efficient cities, (4) resource efficient and adaptive cities, and (5) water wise cities. This categorization, as well as the CBF and TPF are heuristic approaches to speed up the transition towards water wise cities.

Assessing Bandung's Governance Challenges of Water, Waste, and Climate Change: Lessons from Urban Indonesia

Rahmasary

Integr Envir Assess & Manag

2020

This study assesses the gaps, opportunities, and priorities of Bandung in managing its water and waste challenges. The City Blueprint Approach is used to identify pressures, to measure the city's Integrated Water Resources Management performance, and to assess its governance. Based on the analyses of Bandung, 4 topics are discussed in more detail: 1) the transferability of the lessons from Bandung, 2) the challenges of solid waste management in Indonesian cities, 3) communitybased sanitation, and 4) implications for informal settlements. The assessment reveals that Bandung's basic water services are largely met but flood risks are high and wastewater treatment is poorly covered, leading to large-scale pollution. This is amplified by extensive land-use change and poor solid waste collection and treatment, as waste is almost completely dumped in landfills. Proper solid waste handling will reduce landfill dependency. Slum areas are disproportionately affected by climate-related hazards and continuously under recognized in the discussion of cities' risk and vulnerability, while its dwellers are the most vulnerable members of the society. Bandung has started with slum area legalization which provides slum dwellers with legal security that protects their right to live as well as access to basic public infrastructures. Inadequate monitoring and uncoordinated financial source allocations are among the governance gaps. Governance is reactive and community involvement is low. Yet, Bandung exhibits the characteristics of a collaborative city with the potential to maximize its cross-stakeholder learning with supportive leadership. Bandung and other cities in Indonesia face multilevel governance gaps. Bandung is recommended to expand the cooperation of private, civil, and public actors and implement network governance and decentralized management approaches focusing on improving the implementing capacity, better monitoring, cocreation, and better exploration of the options for financial support. Integr Environ Assess Manag 2020;00:1-11.