A Water Sensitive Cities Index – Benchmarking cities in developed and developing countries

Abstract

It is now well understood that water services play an important role in
enhancing a city’s liveability, sustainability, resilience and productivity. Achieving
these outcomes requires a holistic understanding of a city’s water system across its
societal, biophysical and ecological dimensions to develop strategic initiatives that
support the transition to provide more water sensitive practices. The WSC Index
presented in this paper benchmarks cities across 7 goals that describe key attributes of
a water sensitive city. The goals are comprised of 34 indicators across the social,
technical and ecological domain. The indicators have been designed to measure
progress towards achieving water sensitive city goals and assist decision-makers to
prioritise actions for water-related practices. This paper presents early insights from
the application of the WSC index in cities in developing and developed countries and
demonstrates that the WSC Index is able provide important insights to targeted
potential management actions.

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