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

Abstract

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.

The challenges of water, waste and climate change in cities

“…Cities are encouraged to participate in learning alliances to actively share knowledge and experiences on implementation of state-of-the-art technologies (city-to-city learning). This is the most efficient way to improve IWRM (Van Leeuwen 2013; Koop and Van Leeuwen 2015b). Recently, a compendium of best practices has been completed that can help cities to choose among options to improve their performance on water, waste and climate adaptation .…”

Application of the City Blueprint Approach to assess the challenges of water management and governance in Quito (Ecuador)

“…Further details on the data sources, calculation methods and scaling methods and limitations of the TPF are provided by Koop and Van Leeuwen (2015a). This approach has been applied to 45 municipalities and regions (Koop and Van Leeuwen 2015b). The CBF consists of twenty-five performance indicators that are scored from 0 to 10 and listed in Table 2.…”

“…Indicators scoring a concern or great concern (3 or 4 points) are marked and communicated to the stakeholders Further details on the data sources, calculation methods and scaling methods and limitations of the CBF are also provided by Koop and Van Leeuwen (2015a). With this approach, 45 municipalities and regions have been assessed (Koop and Van Leeuwen 2015b). The GCF has been developed as governance appears to be a crucial factor in the sustainability of cities.…”

“…Another major challenge is the city's drinking water security. Quito is a wasteful city (Koop and Van Leeuwen 2015b), with inadequate solid waste treatment, absence of wastewater treatment and combined sewers leading to combined sewer overflows during the rainy season, in turn resulting in losses of clean fresh water. Besides that, with a water leakage rate of 29.3%, almost a third of all water is lost without being consumed.…”

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

“…Many interrelated mechanisms play a role in fulfilling the functions that make a city water secure; these mechanisms can be clarified using systems thinking (Barendrecht et al 2017;Srinivasan et al 2017). Basic criteria, such as meeting urban water demand by adequate supply or treating wastewater to allowable levels, have to be met, while increasing pressures, changing conditions, and governance all influence a city's water security (Bakker and Morinville 2013;Koop and van Leeuwen 2015a;Milman and Short 2008;Rijke et al 2013;Van de Meene et al 2011). Given this complexity, we underscore the need to adopt a systems perspective on urban water security (see also Romero-Lankao and Gnatz 2016).…”