Water Sensitive Cities Index

Benchmarking tool for mapping your city’s current urban water management performance.

Benchmark your city’s current water performance

The Water Sensitive Cities Index is a benchmarking tool for mapping your city’s current urban water management performance against 34 indicators characterising a water sensitive city. The 34 indicators relate to 7 goals of a water sensitive city.

Each indicator is scored on a 1–5 rating scale in a collaborative workshop process. An accredited provider then enters the data into the web-based platform that displays the results and enables them to be compared with results from other cities.

Interested in benchmarking your city?

Where to find more information

You’ll find more information about benchmarking your city on the following pages:

Useful resources

Benchmarking is your critical first step

Developing an understanding of your city’s current water sensitive city performance is a critical first step in becoming a water sensitive city—managing water to meet your city’s needs and to support liveability, sustainability, resilience and productivity.

The Index helps guide coordinated action among stakeholders as you navigate your water sensitive city journey.

Benchmarking puts stakeholders on the same page

With the Index, you will gain:

You’ll receive 3 types of results

Water sensitive city goals

The scores for the WSC Index goals are based on the indicator scores. The goal scores can be presented in a radar chart that highlights your city’s strengths and weaknesses. The larger the polygon, the closer your city is to achieving a score of 5 for each goal area.

City–state position

The scores can be filtered to map the citystates that you’ll find in the Urban Water Transitions Framework. The scores represent your city’s attainment of each citystate (expressed as a percentage). Your city does not have to fully achieve the early citystates to progress to later citystates.

Water sensitive city outcomes

The scores can also be filtered according to the outcomes of a water sensitive city: liveability, sustainability, productivity and resilience. This allows you to focus on particular outcomes.

Last updated: 6th Jun 2023