What do water smart communities look like?

From soil to spring, to sea, to soil again – our relationship with the water cycle has been fragmented for too long. It’s time to rethink how we manage water. How can sustainable practice, climate resilience and integrated approaches reshape our future water management?

Across England and Wales our water cycle is at risk with too much, too little and poor-quality water. We are experiencing frequent severe flooding, sustained droughts and increased impacts on water quality.

Projected UK housing growth in its current form will increase demand on water services to an unsustainable position and impact the wider environment. The existing water network is old and hard to retrofit. But where new housing developments are planned there’s an opportunity to rethink how water arrives at the taps, to work with the construction industry to do things differently.

One solution is to create water-smart communities whose infrastructure treats water where it falls. This approach reduces pollution and flood risk and improves water quality, as an amenity and in the environment.

In practice this could mean harnessing non-potable water using rainwater-harvesting or sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) that integrate nature into the urban setting: think tree pits, permeable pavements and raingardens.

Enabling Water Smart Communities (EWSC) is an innovation project to explore the relationship between integrated water management and new housing. EWSC is exploring which infrastructure solutions can work with nature so that people and the environment thrive.

How do we tackle historic water-industry goliaths to deliver the solutions we need? What does a water-smart community even look like, and how do we get there? The Environment asked five members of the EWSC project team to share their vision.

Anglian Water Services integrated water-management lead George Warren

I have no doubt that by 2040 we will look back at our current practices and scratch our heads. Why, in 2023, were we building houses that used world-class quality water to flush our toilets? My six-year-old has already asked me this question. My attempts to respond sound pretty pathetic.

We need to start building future-proofed developments, with a dual supply pipe to allow for lesser-quality water for this. This can reduce the energy it takes to treat water to this unnecessarily high standard, reducing pumping requirements by using local water. And it uses water currently considered a risk such as flood waters.

Retrofitting is expensive and, sadly, I don’t see this changing any time soon. It is so much cheaper to install dual supply during construction. How much less, I hear you ask? We hope the EWSC project will answer this, offering a clear route for delivery and long-term stewardship of these assets.

We must remove the barriers to delivering this critical infrastructure in all new housing. The homes we build today will be here for the next century at least. The sooner we install this additional pipework into developments and buildings the better. Otherwise we face a huge, expensive task to retrofit our building stock to prevent the UK running out of water.

CIWEM director of innovation and delivery Paul Shaffer

People and water are inextricably linked. To deliver water-smart communities people need to be front and centre. The impact people have on water and the impact of water on people has been important for millennia – and we need to work with people to manage the challenges we face with too much, too little and the wrong quality of water.

The choices we make in land use and economic development all have implications for how we manage the water cycle. The benefits of integrated water-management, where the water cycle becomes an integral and visible part of our places and spaces, is becoming realised.

Water-smart communities provide people with opportunities to become aware of their role in managing the water cycle, appreciating interactions that deliver opportunities that are ecologically rich, attractive, and economical.

We can’t bury water, hiding it underground: we desperately need to seek opportunities to integrate water into our developments, where we can appreciate it and better understand mutual dependencies.

Improving legibility and understanding will enable us to deliver water-smart communities and multiple benefits that include improvements to the quality of our local environment and the quality of life for communities. People, whether it be practitioners that design developments or the communities that live there, are integral to water-smart communities.

University of East Anglia associate professor Tom Hargreaves

A water-smart community plays an active role in shaping sustainable water futures. Communities themselves must play a significant role in their development and management.

Our research at the University of East Anglia (UEA) is exploring the different types of water communities that already exist and understanding how communities themselves can be more productively engaged.

Water-smart communities are important because they offer a chance to develop new relationships between water companies and communities. There has been a historic tendency in the water industry to treat people as passive consumers that want as little as possible to do with water other than paying the lowest price.

This has resulted in communities being kept at arms-length and excluded from decision-making, whilst water companies get on with implementing solutions. Which has, in part, contributed to low levels of public trust in water companies.

Water-smart communities offer an opportunity to challenge this type of relationship and engage people as active citizens who care about, and are invested in, the development of their own communities and local areas.

A key challenge will be to inspire a culture change in the water industry to get beyond large-scale technofix solutions. Current engineering-based approaches often shut out societal engagement so that even when people want to get involved or develop innovative solutions to water problems, these are often discouraged or are hard to realise.

To try and change this, our research at UEA will explore the diverse forms of engagement with water resources that already exist in different communities and examine how different kinds of water infrastructure generate and encourage different forms of community engagement.

The challenge will be to identify the most important lessons to inspire new, more diverse and extensive forms of societal engagement and working out how build them.

University of Manchester project lead Claire Hoolohan and research associate Ella Foggitt

To meet society’s economic and social goals without compromising on sustainability, effective management of limited water resources is vital. New homes need to be flood and drought-resilient and enable residents to use water sustainably.

The urgency of achieving this is amplified by anticipated climate-change impacts. Expected changes in temperature and rainfall will have implications for supply and demand and extreme events like drought and flood are likely to become more frequent.

Hardware interventions such as SuDS have an important role to play but we need to look beyond technical solutions to realise water-smart communities’ full potential. The software – by which we mean the social aspects of water systems – also provides potential avenues toward more sustainable water futures.

We must also consider how water-smart communities support a socially just transition to climate-change adaptation, through for example, investigating the affordability of these homes. How much and how often people use water in their everyday routines is shaped by the design of their home and the infrastructures to which they connect.

We need to design water-smart communities that support sustainable domestic practices, to help the people who live there to use less water. That’s also the answer to cutting domestic energy use and carbon emissions, and to reducing the quantities of unflushables that enter our sewer systems.

Each of these challenges requires us to consider who will live in these water-smart communities – and how – to be able to design them to support sustainable lifestyles. And for water-smart communities to deliver, they must recognise the diversity of people who will live there, and how different routines affect ordinary water use.

Bringing in new coalitions of actors to overcome siloes in design opens an opportunity to learn about joined-up approaches to resolving challenges. We learn about these by reflecting on lessons learned from existing mains-limited communities and demonstrations.

We therefore take a long-term approach that reflects on water-smart communities’ pasts, presents and futures to understand how these homes meet social and environmental objectives, now and into the future.

Southern Water future growth lead Sandra Norval

Water is the essence of life. But for many of us it’s out of sight, buried in infrastructure that magically delivers fresh water and takes our waste away. We assume it will always just be there.

Water companies have statutory duties to supply water cheaply and sustainably. As the climate changes and as population and economic growth put pressure on our supply, it is time for us to rethink how we do this.

Since the Victorian era, we have developed new technologies and approaches that enable us to be smart about how we find, deliver and make our water more sustainable. Delivering that shift requires a new way of working with infrastructure.

We need to change how we plan for water, design in more sustainable behaviour and operations and change policy so that we all value water as the essential resource it is. The EWSC project positions us to shape how UK communities work with water. It brings together communities, academics, professionals and policy leaders who will make a difference.

This project will bring water back into focus. It will help people to understand why water matters. It will shift how we access it, move it, use it and return it into the water cycle, completing the loop to benefit human life and wildlife. Between us we can shape the future we need to lead positive lifestyles in a changed world.

This article was originally in the June edition of CIWEM’s The Environment magazine.