Ensuring Water Secure Cities: Learnings From Global Best Practices For Mainstreaming Circular Economy In Wastewater Management

Water scarcity has become a global crisis, with about 2.4 billion people living in countries experiencing water stress and 2.2 billion without access to safely managed drinking water services. In cities, the major challenge is providing water security to the rapidly growing population in emerging economies that will be at risk due to exposure to increased occurrence of climate-induced extreme events such as droughts and floods and vulnerability due to the absence of adequate water supply services. The solution lies in strengthening policy interventions and governance responses, managing water demand, and making the water systems more resilient. Wastewater treatment and reuse is a distinct alternative to augment water supply, reducing the pressure on existing freshwater resources and improving the water environment. The existence of wastewater treatment infrastructure is a strong function of economic development, with some of the G20 member countries, such as the USA, Australia, and Germany, having high per capita GDPs, also having high wastewater treatment capacity. There is an opportunity to learn from the experiences of the G20 countries in the global North and South that are at an advanced stage of wastewater treatment and reuse as well as resource recovery. We discuss the importance of governance, finance, technology, capacity building, and data and information, and make recommendations from the learnings for countries yet to consider wastewater as a resource. Further, we discuss the role of partnerships in knowledge sharing and building capacities to strengthen urban wastewater treatment systems and enable reuse.