LONG-TERM WATER SECURITY IN CITIES

By Dr. Gonzalo Delacámara Director, Centre for Water & Climate Adaptation, IE University

As irrigation agriculture is responsible for the most relevant share of global freshwater withdrawal (72%, according to UN FAO), water challenges have long been seen through a rural lens given their implications on agriculture and food security. However, water security is increasingly becoming a prominent urban issue too.

By 2050, 55% of the global population is expected to live in cities above 50,000 inhabitants. Water demand is expected to increase by 55% by then, especially due to growing demand from manufacturing, power generation, and domestic use.

As a consequence of climate change, population growth, and rapid urbanization, cities will continue to face multiple pressures linked to deteriorating water quality and hygiene, increasing natural hazards (floods, droughts, sea-level rise), conflicts over water allocation, and aging infrastructure.

IDA WCC 2023 provided us with the opportunity to discuss from different angles some of the challenges around long-term water security in cities. Conventionally water security has not been at the core of approaches to urban water management. Water utilities were responsible for managing a wide range of infrastructures to deliver public services. Now, gradually, mostly in the most advanced economies, they also have the imperative of managing data.

Minister Hania Pérez de Cuéllar, responsible for Housing, Building and Sanitation at the Government of Peru, and Chris Holmes, Senior Consultant at Boston Consulting Group. Chris, a world-class expert, most recently served at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as global water coordinator. He was responsible for coordinating the agency’s five-year, $2 billion water supply, sanitation and hygiene program, which included developing public-private partnerships with major US companies in the water sector. He also held two US Senate-confirmed positions at the US Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), including serving as the agency's third-ranking executive as chief financial officer.

Minister Pérez de Cuéllar, in turn, holding a M.A. in Social and Economic Development at La Sorbonne (Paris), faces on a daily basis very demanding challenges, as there is still a significant gap in the provision of water and sanitation services (mainly, but not only, in human settlements in rural Peru). Just a few days before travelling to Seville, Minister Pérez de Cuéllar had to deal with a major crisis in Greater Lima (11.4 million inhabitants, producing roughly 50% of all Peruvian GDP): Sedapal, the water utility for Lima and Callao, announced intermittent interruption to water services with a plan for restoration within 36 to 96 hours.

Although in this case that temporary and intermittent supply cut was the outcome of efforts to replace assets, Lima, as most of the most relevant metropolitan areas in Latin America and elsewhere, is suffering from long-term water insecurity stemming from constraints upstream.

Nowadays, dealing with water and sanitation services in cities without looking at watersheds is but a chimera. Constraints in terms of bulk water availability should not be explained by long-term availability concerns (i.e., uncertain rainfall patterns, increased evapotranspiration rates, etc.), now compounded by climate change. Droughts are but the acute manifestation of a chronic challenge: water scarcity. Water shortages are also the unintended outcome of pressures from the demand side, quite often upstream.

A number of issues were discussed: the role of nature-based solutions to complement conventional infrastructure development, unconventional emergency sources of water in the transition towards universal, improved access to water and sanitation services, the need to deliver new financial mechanisms to ensure resources, urban water management integrated with river basin management, water tariffs as a means for social and territorial cohesion...