Water security is widely recognized as an important and increasingly urgent policy challenge. Cities face unique water risks because they rely on other jurisdictions to supply at least part of the city’s water requirement and for the disposal of wastewater and sludge.
Existing measures of water security are formulated at the national or river basin level and capture current, average conditions rather than future risks. Cities face distinctive water risks because of their high concentration of population and economic activity, dependence on large-scale infrastructure and inter-dependence with other units of government and face both risks and opportunities relating to financial, administrative, and technological capacity.
To address this challenge, appropriate indicators are needed to stimulate policy action and measure the effectiveness of interventions. We applied the PAM methodology to develop an integrated assessment framework of urban water security, The new index provides a more nuanced measure of urban water security and enabled benchmarking between these two case studies. Highlights of this research is as follow,
- Pilots the indicators in two cities – Singapore and Hong Kong
- Development of indicators to support policy formulation to improve urban water security
Proposes tailored indicators to take into account the specific water security challenges of cities