Urban Water Security Dashboard: Systems Approach to Characterizing the Water Security of Cities

Abstract

Urban water security is a major concern in the context of urbanization and climate change. Water security goes beyond having good infrastructure or good governance. Systems thinking can help in understanding the mechanisms that influence the long-term water security of a city. Therefore, we developed a dashboard of 56 indicators based on the pressure-state-impact-response (PSIR) framework. We applied the dashboard to ten cities to capture different characteristics of their water security and ranked the cities based on their overall water security index score. We found the highest levels of water security in wealthy cities in water-abundant environments (Amsterdam and Toronto), in which security is determined by the ability of the city to mitigate flood risks and the sustainability of hinterland dependencies for water supply. The lowest security was found in developing cities (Nairobi, Lima, and Jakarta). Here, the combination of large socioeconomic pressures (e.g., rapid population growth, slums, low GDP, polluting industries) and an inadequate response (weak institutions, and poor planning and operational management) leads to inappropriate fulfilment of all functions of the urban water system.

Drying conditions in Switzerland – indication from a 35-year Landsat time-series analysis of vegetation water content estimates to support SDGs

“…Early recognition of plant water stress and the understanding of the dynamics over different regions can be critical to prevent some consequences. To support decision-makers and practitioners to gain knowledge on a specific issue, all the generated information can be organized and made available using dashboards and data stories (Fegraus et al, 2012;Van Ginkel, Hoekstra, Buurman, & Hogeboom, 2018). It allows users to visualize and explore relevant information in a concise and comprehensible way .…”

Assessment of the Urban Water Security in a Severe Water Stress Area–Application to Palestinian Cities

“…The water security indicators were classified into three categories: water resources (WR), water services (WS) and water governance (WG). The water resource category was selected according to the recommendations of the IWA [41], the OECD [11] and Ginkel et al [18]. It includes indicators that impact the availability and quality of the water resources, such as the water resources availability (WRA) [41], annual precipitation (AP) [11,41] and the ratio of treated wastewater (RTW).…”

Urban water systems: Development of micro-level indicators to support integrated policy

“…Following the work of van Ginkel et al [27], we employ the Pressure-State-Impact-Response (PSIR) framework to develop indicators. PSIR is a well-established approach for the development of indicators in dynamic environmental systems [28][29][30][31] and has been applied to waterrelated issues [32][33][34][35].…”