Abstract

Enhancing water security is crucial to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 6 set by the United Nations. Assessing water security is an essential step to address issues, inform planning and implement and monitor water security actions, especially in the urban space, where inequality and diversity pose important challenges. This work investigates downscaling water security assessment to provide detailed information on local challenges and specific needs of neighbourhoods/sectors within the city. To capture multiple perspectives of urban water security, an evaluation framework, based on the UN water security definition, is presented as well as first results for a case study of the city of Campinas in Brazil, used to illustrate the application of the developed framework. The spatial distribution of water security in the urban area can provide a more accurate picture of its diversity and help to understand local necessities and identify areas with specific issues, helping to guide infrastructure planning and the development of local initiatives and policies towards improving water security at the community/neighbourhood level.

About Juliana Marcal

Juliana Marcal is a civil engineer with a MSc in Environment and Natural, Industrial and Urban Risks. During her studies, she worked with decentralized wastewater treatment systems and later has gained a range of experiences in industry working on the modelling of water supply networks and micro drainage projects. As part of the Water Informatics: Science and Engineering (WISE) Centre of Doctoral Training she is now in her second year of research at the University of Bath (UK) where she is developing her project entitled “Improving urban water security by sectorisation of the urban area and decentralisation of water infrastructure”.