Towards More Resilient Water Infrastructures

Abstract

Currently, cities are confronting a multitude of challenges including climate change, demographic change, urbanization and land subsidence. Resulting flooding, droughts and other disturbances could lead to water shortages, severe interruptions, hydraulic problems or underutilization of water infrastructure systems. One way that cities can become more resilient is by diversifying their water resources and reducing their dependency on central water infrastructures. Water infrastructure systems consisting of decentral or semi-central partial systems would be more resilient because a failure in these systems would only affect a small part of the urban area. Instead of an incremental improvement of the water infrastructure, there is a need for system innovations that will allow an adaptive development to changing conditions and which will ensure that future sustainability challenges are met. However, moving towards more resilient water technologies is seen as controversial for built-up areas. To answer the question if a transformation to a more resilient water infrastructure in built-up areas is feasible (technically and economically), a balancing and assessment of the corresponding effects have been done by way of comparing a “transformation” scenario with a reference scenario “business as usual”. If one takes a long-term period of observation (70 years), the costs balance of the scenarios “reference” and “transformation” both turn out to be on a comparative level. By contrast, the consumption of environmental resources in the scenario “transformation” is almost twice as low as in the “reference”.