City Blueprints: 24 Indicators to Assess the Sustainabilityof the Urban Water Cycle

Climate change, population growth and increased consumption, coupled withurbanization, are all placing increased pressure on water management. This global challengecan often best be addressed at the local level, e.g. in cities by optimizing the role of civilsociety. Although there are approaches for assessing the sustainability of countries and cities,there is no dedicated framework for the assessment of the sustainability of urban watermanagement. We have therefore compiled a comprehensive list of indicators (the cityblueprint) for this. The city blueprint is proposed as a first step towards gaining a betterunderstanding and addressing the challenges of integrated urban water management(IUWM). City blueprints will enable the IUWM of cities to be compared, and stimulatethe exchange of success stories (good practices) between cities to address the enormousIUWM challenges which lie ahead. The city blueprint provides a quick scan a nd baselineassessment. It comprises elements from a variety of methodologies, such as water footprint,urban metabolism and ecosystem services. The indicators have been subdivided into eightbroad categories, i.e. (1) water security following the water footp rint approach developed byHoekstra and Chapagain ( 2007 ), (2) water quality, which includes surface water andgroundwater, (3) drinking water, (4) sanitation, (5) infrastructure, (6) climate robustness, (7 biodiversity and attractiveness and (8) governance. Experience using city blueprints for the citiesof Rotterdam, Maastricht and Venlo (in the Netherlands) have been included as practicalexamples. It was concluded that simplicity (ease of calculation and data availability), transparencyand ease of communicat ion makes the blueprint a valuable tool for policy makers, decisionmakers and resource managers as a first step in the process of understanding, envisioning,developing and implementing measures to transform the water management of cities. The bestresults a re obtained when all the stakeholders are involved and connected right from the start.