What is Integrated Water Management?
Integrated Water Management (IWM) is the heart of the Enabling Water Smart Communities (EWSC) project.
IWM is a collaborative approach to land and water governance that integrates social, environmental, and economic factors to deliver coordinated management of water storage, supply, demand, wastewater, flood risk, water quality and the wider environment.
Our current water management system has many components including water supply, flood risk management, water quality, research, and resource planning. Each of these require a input from a variety of organisations with different interests, (developers, land owners, architects, farmers, legislators, etc.), leading to a fragmented sector. This means easier and cheaper solutions have historically been favoured, which significantly impacts our natural environment and misses opportunities for better outcomes.
Achieving Integrated Water Management is fundamental to meeting long-term challenges facing our relationship with water, including flood risk, and river and soil health.
Below is an example approach developed by Arup to IWM which we have used during the project development.
So, what does this look like in practice?
It looks like building new homes with water efficient technology to reduce water use, such as dedicated rainwater harvesting and utilising non-potable water for activities like flushing toilets. Using harvested rainwater can reduce household demand for water by 30-50%.
It looks like incorporating sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) into new developments, which are essential to addressing growing surface water flood risks and tackling water quality problem. Alongside managing flood risk SuDS can clean polluted water running off hard surfaces like roads and reduce the likelihood of sewage spills into watercourse. They also create valuable green spaces in urban settings, and provide more attractive, heatwave-resilient places for local people. By integrating drought resistant plants and landscapes we optimise our water resources for the future.
Genuine water cycle management, from source to sea, is very difficult to achieve. IWM offers solutions which account for treating water where it falls, reducing pollution, preventing flood risk and improving water quality both as an amenity and in the environment. IWM is the way we will deliver long-term sustained benefits and improved environmental outcomes.
What makes IWM adoption the holy grail is how difficult it is. The water industry is a system of systems with large networks of governance and bodies which make efforts to integrate them naturally difficult. Many projects focus too much on the cost and not enough on the tangible value which include lowering flood risk, improving water quality, providing resilience in developments as well as protecting biodiversity and nature.
The EWSC project will be developing pilot demonstrator sites to showcase approaches to integrated water management and the technologies in a variety of different settings.
