Water Smart Communities

Embracing water stewardship for a sustainable future

Water Smart Communities (WSCs) are places where people embrace the principles of water stewardship and are empowered by the necessary assets and systems to use water wisely and with care for the environment.

A Blueprint for Sustainable Living with Water.

How we live with water shapes our social life, economic context and our environment. Entanglement between water systems and housing delivery poses both, sectoral challenges and is an opportunity to build resilient water systems into new homes.

Around the world integrated water management (IWM) initiatives offer alternative ways to sustainably manage water in housing development. These interventions allow us to treat water where it falls, reduce flood risk and improve water quality. However, they are not yet mainstream in England and Wales, in part due to stewardship issues, static regulatory and policy standards and lack of affordability. ​

Water smart communities (WSCs) combine different elements of water management together with housing delivery to -- visionsaryxx

Some key features of WSCs are:

Informed by a common set of principles, such as care and respect for the water as a common good; consider water as integral part of good place-making and essential for the delivery of wider outcomes. ​

Created and stewarded by actors who collectively are equipped with the skills, capacity and agency that align with their risks, liabilities and duties. ​

Rooted in contextual knowledge and wisdom and encourage interactivity and feedback between people and their environment, to build a rich picture of how water is used, where it comes from and where it goes.​

Place-based. A WSC will typically be associated with people living in a place at nieghbourhood or individual development scale. (Recognising that local definitions of community may not always be spatial, may be fluid and may vary over time) ​

Communities have agency and can shape their role in the process, inform identification of challenges and development of solutions. ​

Water smart outcomes, local benefits and wider value are created through their delivery, these are outlined in the next slide.

WSCs create benefits across multiple systems

For example, they can:

  • Reconnecting communities and local environments​

  • Creating a healthy water environment​

  • Enabling understanding of the multiple values of water​

  • Delivering sustainable water use ​

  • Lowering household bills ​

  • Delivering rich amenity ​

  • Contributing to housing quality and affordable housing​

  • Designing for net zero​

  • Delivering nature-based solutions​

  • Supporting environment enhancement in a cost neutral way ​

  • Building community wealth​

  • Improving biodiversity  ​

  • Increasing resilience to climate change 

For a water smart community to exist and thrive, three building blocks need to be in place: ​value, assets and stewardship. ​

Click on each building block to learn more about it.

Assets

Value

Stewardship