EU commission publishes Urban Water Atlas about 40 cities
The European Commission published the Urban Water Atlas for Europe, a complete panorama of water management in European cities.
The publication include the Blue City Index of 40 European cities on 25 water related topics. In Europe Amsterdam is the best performing city with a BCI of 8.3 (on top photo - Rainproof project). The City Blueprints, developed by KWR and also provided in the atlas, show cities’ performance in terms of overall water management.
Amsterdam has six maximum scores, including on the energy efficiency of waste water treament.
Two major barriers
According to Kees van Leeuwen (KWR) and Richard Elelman (NetwercH2O), coordinators of the City Blueprints project, there are two major barriers for cities to keep up with the increasing demand for water.
Van Leeuwen en Elelman mention the increasing costs and the increasing complexity of the water issues. “Many cities have old systems and the cost of urban infrastructure is staggering,” they write.
Additionally they address in the atlas the complexity of managing major infrastructure developments in dense and rapidly growing cities.
Their advice to cities is not to wait for damaging events to occur that forces cities to make responsive investments. Instead cities should plan and invest in advance.
Blue City Index of European capitals (source: Urban Water Atlas for Europe).
Best practices
The Urban Water Atlas for Europe provides a wealth of information on best practices, viable solutions that can be of use to city officials and urban water experts.
An interesting feature of the atlas is the fact that a lot of water is required to produce food, but very different quantities are needed for the production of different types of food.
Blue city index
The atlas also includes the City Blueprints of 40 European cities, illustrating the city’s water demand and availability, flood and drought risk, trends and pressures and water footprint.
For each city, the atlas also provides the Blue City Index, which varies from 0 to 10. This is the overall score based on the 25 indicators of the City Blueprint.
The Urban Water Atlas for Europe can be downloaded for free from the EU book shop as a pdf file (82 mB).
This news item was originally published on the websites of KWR and the EU Science hub.
Read also on this website
● Towards adaptive circular cities with cross sectorial investments combining several goals, 8 June 2016
● Leeuwarden declaration considered key for implementation of EU water policies, 11 April 2016
● Amsterdam wins European iCapital 2016 award and awaits Innovation Expo, 12 April 2016
More information
City Blueprint project
www.bluescities.eu
EIP Water
www.eip-water.eu
KWR Watercycle Research Institute
Nieuwegein, the Netherlands
+31 30 606 9511
www.kwrwater.nl/en