UN Division for Sustainable Development

Case Study Detail Record

Organization type:	Government

Name of Ministry/Agency:	Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry for Sustainable Development

Country:	Sweden

Name of Focal Point:	Ms. Cecelia Scharp, Coordinator for CSD

Initiative Title:	Urban Water: Contributing to the Goals from Johannesburg

Internet links:	http://www.urbanwater.org/default_eng.htm

Scope:	National: - Sweden

Status:

Timeframe:	Start: End:

Stakeholders/Partners:

Relevent issues:	- Integrated Water Resource Management

Objectives/Challenges:

The Urban Water research programme aims at developing:
-- support for strategic decisions on future design and operation of sustainable water and wastewater systems.
-- a comprehensive decision support for those actors taking part in the planning and decision-making of water and wastewater systems for the future.

Decision support includes sustainability criteria, knowledge about different systems, and general methods and tools to be used for the production and presentation of knowledge. The Urban Water decision support is intended for use in Sweden as well as abroad, in developing countries as well as in Eastern Europe. Countries with established urban water management systems are confronting the challenge of renovation; countries planning new systems have to tackle the large investments this requires. In both cases there is a need for systematic comparative assessments between different alternatives.

Lessons Learned:

The output from this model city project is still under analysis but a number of experiences have thus far emerged. First and foremost, the local stakeholders were encouraging a comprehensive approach, and understood the Urban Water framework. That sustainable urban water systems are more than mere technology was established quite early in the process. However, that this implies changed norms and routines for the technicians as well as a more heterogeneous network of actors was not accepted as easily.

The tools in the toolbox were working and useful, but the outputs guiding the participants’ assessments were not always easy to grasp for the local group. Here we are in need of a more refined means of communicating research results as well as developing the tools in order to make them more independent of researchers for practical use.

The participation of different local stakeholders highlighted some of the complications related to participation. The aim of participation needs to be clarified -- is it for more effective implementation, to arrive at better decisions, educative, trust building or to enhance communication? In our case, the municipality’s technical office saw effective
implementation and education as the main goals, but these goals were not explicitly expressed. The aim of participation needs to be reflected upon early in the process. Who is to be invited and why are other questions to consider, linked to issues like legitimacy and accountability.

Another reflection to make in relation to this test case is the importance of communicating worldviews. Different goals, worldviews or system definitions are one of the main obstacles for communication, and thereby for implementation. This is often due to the fact that these aspects are placed on the hidden agenda instead of being discussed. Shared worldviews are not a prerequisite for successful implementation, but an awareness of them is.

In conclusion: the challenge of sustainable urban water management systems deals, of course, with developing better knowledge of better systems, but there is most probably a higher marginal effect in developing processes for communicative planning and facilitating institutional capacity. The Urban Water programme contributes to both.

Policy Options:

The relevant WSSD goals addressed in the program are:
- to halve the number of people that do not have access to drinking water by 2015 - to halve the number of people that do not have access sanitation by 2015
- to give at least 100 million slum dwellers a better life, including shelter, water and sanitation, by the year 2020.

The Urban Water programme has adopted the following general vision for sustainable urban water management:
"Every human being has a right to clean water. For urban areas, our vision is water management where water and its constituents can be safely used, reused and returned to nature."

To make this happen, a comprehensive approach is needed, emphasising technical and economic aspects as well as the challenges of institutional capacity and public participation in the planning process. There is also a need for integrating the urban area into the catchments in order to make proper analyses and avoid sub-optimisation in the planning process.

Summary:

A prerequisite for Urban Water systems analysis is to adopt a definition of an urban water management system that includes the technical structure, the organisation and the users of the system. To tackle the issue of contextual variance, the programme is taking place in five different “model cities” representing a country town, an old city centre, a suburban area, a newly built area and an urban enclave (i.e., a smaller area with its own water and/or wastewater system, existing within a larger urban area). Since 2001, researchers from the programme have been working with a local group of stakeholders in a Swedish country town, Surahammar, in order to develop and test the Urban Water decision support.

Knowledge of possible and realistic systems for drinking water, wastewater and storm water in general have been developed and brought together in the Urban Water programme. We are working with membrane technology for the production of drinking water, with source separating wastewater systems as well as sludge fractionation for phosphorous recovery and with the beneficial use of storm water.

In Surahammar, three system structures for wastewater were designed together by researchers and stakeholders: a conventional system with reuse of sludge, kitchen waste disposers connected to the sewers and a black water system. In all three systems, the municipality should be the responsible agency. For all three, 15 criteria relating to health and hygiene, environment, economy and socioculture were analysed. Local stakeholders carried out comparative assessments of the outputs from the analysis to determine which system was preferable with respect to local conditions in Surahammar.

The analysis did not clearly favour any of the alternatives, which is most often the case in these kinds of planning situations. Pharmaceuticals are, in general, an area of great uncertainty, and the weak point in our toolbox this far. Regarding the spread of heavy metals, the kitchen waste disposal system showed the poorest results. The black water system was best at recovering nutrients, but involves large investment costs. On the other hand, the costs for operation and maintenance are lowest in the black water system. There is the risk of a lack of robustness in the black water system, but it is the one that best meets the political environmental goals in Sweden as well as the intentions of the Environmental Code.

The planning of future urban water systems has a multi-dimensional character and must include a methodology for the integration of knowledge areas. Direct weighting is not a suitable method since the different areas of knowledge are on incommensurable scales. We have chosen the multi-criteria decision-aid NAIADE, which is a software product dealing with different kinds of knowledge. Another advantage of NAIADE is that it really is an aid, not a decision-machine black-boxing the arguments for the decision taken. We will in the coming year start our work to make the results from the Urban Water Programme available to developing countries and countries in Eastern Europe through a series of workshops.