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

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.