BUILDING A WATEROPTIMIZED MIAMI: WHAT CITIES CAN DO TO MOVE FROM WATER SCARCITY TO ABUNDANCE

BY CLOVIS SARMENTO-LEITE

How can city leaders, policymakers, and regulators use the City Water Optimization Index to make resource, investment, and policy decisions to optimize urban water systems to ensure the reliability, accessibility, and sustainability of water, both today and tomorrow?

To safeguard the reliability, accessibility, and sustainability of urban water resources in the face of aging infrastructure, increasing populations, climate change, and other water challenges, cities need to think of water optimization as a circular process rather than a linear relationship.

The City Water Optimization Index, developed by Economist Impact and supported by DuPont Water Solutions, investigates how 51 cities around the world (including Miami) are ensuring that all end users have access to safe, affordable, and reliable water, both now and in the future.

At Smart City Expo Miami, we explored how city leaders, policymakers, and regulators can use the Index (and Miami’s unique data) to make resource, investment, and policy decisions with the goal of optimizing urban water systems to ensure the reliability, accessibility, and sustainability of water, both today and tomorrow.

Virtually everywhere we looked, we found signs of severe water scarcity: acute water stress from Los Angeles, Mexico City, Santiago, and Madrid to Baku, Dushanbe, Riyadh, and beyond. But we also found signs of promise. Low- and middle-income cities (such as São Paulo, Sofia, and Medellin) earned among the highest marks, showing that preparing for a water-scarce future—for all the challenges, financial, political, geographic, or otherwise—doesn’t have to break a city budget. Better yet, low-cost steps such as finding and plugging leaks, updating building codes to incentivize water conservation, and instituting real-time monitoring are among the most effective for improving water reliability, accessibility, and sustainability.

The mundane—fodder for water-district meetings and regulatory findings and sewer commission hearings—may well be what helps save cities’ water supplies. These sorts of actions are likely to enjoy broad support. Roughly 74% of those surveyed—5,100-plus people around the world—expressed “growing concerns about the safety and security of their drinking water.” In cities in developing nations, such as Mexico City, Pune, and Kathmandu, the figure climbs as high as 82%.

This, in short, is not merely a challenge; for city leaders, it is an opportunity. Incorporating the use of reclaimed water, for example, is backed by more than half of those surveyed for the Index—and by 67% of those surveyed in low- and middle-income cities. Meanwhile, reimagining water as a circular rather than a linear process unlocks enormous benefits for local water supplies.

Those are the sorts of gains that can be locked in through regular audits and accounting, real-time management, and public education to ensure continued high support for conservation and reclamation. They can be further reinforced by expanding sewer connectivity, incorporating AI-powered monitoring platforms, and instituting water reclamation.

Water scarcity isn’t a mere byproduct of climate change; as UNICEF puts it, “Change in climate is felt primarily through a change in water.” Preserving our water resources—and ensuring they remain reliable, accessible, and sustainable for the years and generations to come—is the challenge of our time, especially for the local leaders on the front lines.

This Index offers a playbook on how to address this challenge. Courageous local politicians, policymakers, and regulators can seize this moment and make their cities international models for preparing for our climate future.