Editorial

Urban water management to increase sustainability of cities

This paper uses a social practices lens to examine water management practices of households in Addis Ababa and Dar es Salaam, their drivers and opportunities for change and discusses how far these practices fit into a sustainable urban water management agenda in an urban African context. The paper is based on interviews and workshops with inhabitants in two case sites as well as city stakeholders. In both cities the official discourse is the development and extension of universal conventional centralised water systems. However these are malfunctioning systems co-existing with various decentralised household water management practices. One challenge is how to complement the resource-intensive modern infrastructure ideal with low-technology, green infrastructure-based approaches. Another is how to change the discursive framings of existing decentralised practices from disqualification as ‘rural’ practices unfit for the urban. Finally, as developing cities purse sustainable development goals it is necessary to strengthen the ability of the urban water regime to support co-production and decentralised water management activities whilst reconfiguring those elements of practices that are inherently unsustainable.

Due to rapid urbanization, population growth and economic drivers, megacities and metropolises around the world face increasing water challenges, such as water scarcity, degradation of water resources and water-related risks such as flooding. Climate change is expected to put additional stress on already strained metropolitan water management systems. Although there is considerable research on river basin management and on urban water management, there is hardly any on metropolitan water management. Similarly, as urban water generally emerges from and returns to river basins, it is surprising how little literature there is that explicitly connects these two spheres of governance. Hence this review paper addresses the: What does a review of the literature tell us about the overlap and reconciliation between the concepts of Integrated Water Resources/River Basin Management and Metropolitan/Urban Water Management, particularly in relation to megacities? Based on an extensive literature review, this paper concludes that the key differences between the two are in relation to their overarching framework, scope, inputs and outputs of water and in relation to dealing with extreme weather events. The literature review reveals how sustainable and integrated urban water management increasingly adopt principles and rhetoric from integrated water resource management, this has yet to translate into significant changing practices on the ground. Urban water management still often occurs independently of river basin issues. Achieving coherence between river basin management and sustainable/integrated urban water management is even more difficult in metropolises and megacities, because the latter consists of multiple political-administrative units. The article concludes that the scalar mismatch between river basin management and metropolitan/megacity water governance deserves much greater attention than it currently receives in the academic and policy debates.

Many modern cities have strongly invested in the sustainability of their urban water management system. Nordic cities like Stockholm or Copenhagen are amongst pioneers in investments towards integrated urban water management. However, cities can never be fully self-sufficient due to their dependency on external (water) resources. In this paper, we quantify this water dependency with respect to food consumption in nine cities located in the five Nordic countries (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland), by means of the water footprint concept. Detailed urban water footprint assessments are scarce in the literature. By analysing national nutrition surveys, we find that urban food intake behaviour differs from national food intake behaviour. In large Nordic cities people eat generally less potatoes, milk products (without cheese), meat and animal fats and they drink less coffee than outside city borders. On the other hand, they generally eat more vegetables and vegetable oils and they drink more tea and alcoholic beverages. This leads consistently – for the six large Nordic cities Stockholm, Malmö, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Oslo and Reykjavik – to slightly smaller food related urban water footprints (−2 to −6%) than national average values. We also analyse the water footprint for different diets based upon Nordic Nutrition Recommendations (NNR) for these cities. We assessed three healthy diet scenarios: 1) including meat (HEALTHY-MEAT), 2) pesco-vegetarian (HEALTHY-PESCO-VEG) and 3) vegetarian (HEALTHY-VEG). This shows that Nordic urban dwellers 1) eat too many animal products (red meat, milk and milk products) and sugar and drink too much alcohol and 2) they eat not enough vegetables, fruit and products from the group pulses, nuts and oilcrops. Their overall energy and protein intake is too high. A shift to a healthy diet with recommended energy and protein intake reduces the urban WF related to food consumption substantially. A shift to HEALTHY-MEAT results in a reduction of −9 to −24%, for HEALTHY-PESCO-VEG the reduction is −29 to −37%, for HEALTHY-VEG the reduction is −36 to −44%. In other words, Nordic urban dwellers can save a lot of water by shifting to a healthy diet.