Urban water utility leaders
Executives and service managers coordinating supply, demand, sanitation, reuse, and long-term operational responsibilities.
Flagship Book
Integrated Urban Water Management
Connecting Services, Catchments, Governance, and Resilience
ISBN 978-1-991406-24-8 · Our Future Water · First EditionKnowledge for practical climate action.
Cities cannot secure reliable water services by improving individual projects alone. Decisions about supply, drainage, land use, finance, and public accountability must work together over time.
For utility leaders, planners, policymakers, and infrastructure professionals, Integrated Urban Water Management offers a framework for making those connections. It combines comparative cases with analysis of system boundaries, institutional responsibilities, and implementation conditions, helping readers assess which approaches fit their own cities.
Explore diversified supply, wastewater reuse, demand reduction, stormwater, ecosystem protection, and digital decision support. Examine funding, maintenance, affordability, participation, and risk allocation alongside technical performance. Distinguish observed outcomes from modeled or proposed benefits before transferring a lesson between places.
Across fifteen chapters, the book connects diagnosis to practical delivery. Build a clearer basis for comparing interventions, assigning responsibilities, and planning adaptive review. Use the evidence to ask sharper questions, expose trade-offs, and develop strategies that can be financed, operated, and sustained.
A framework for informed decisions and accountable action.
- 01
Define urban water system boundaries and diagnose how service objectives, land use, catchments, and institutional responsibilities interact.
- 02
Compare water supply, demand management, reuse, sanitation, drainage, and ecological interventions using evidence appropriate to local conditions.
- 03
Assess who funds, operates, maintains, and bears the risks of an integrated water portfolio over its full lifecycle.
- 04
Examine affordability, participation, distributional effects, ecological constraints, and public-health safeguards alongside technical performance.
- 05
Distinguish observed results from modeled, proposed, historical, and context-dependent case findings before transferring lessons between cities.
- 06
Apply a common decision framework linking evidence, authority, resources, capabilities, accountability, and adaptive review to implementation.
Contents
View the full contents 17 sections
- Introduction
Integrated Urban Water Management as a City-Building Challenge
Chapter 1: Defining Integrated Urban Water Management
Chapter 2: Urban Water Risk, Vulnerability, and Resilience
Chapter 3: Diagnosing Urban Water Performance
Chapter 4: Diversified Water Supply Portfolios
Chapter 5: Wastewater, Reuse, and Resource Recovery
Chapter 6: Demand Management and Water-Efficient Cities
Chapter 7: Stormwater Management and Urban Flood Resilience
Chapter 8: Catchments, Ecosystems, and Source-Water Protection
Chapter 9: Water-Sensitive Urban Design and Land-Use Integration
Chapter 10: Institutions, Regulation, and Multi-Level Governance
Chapter 11: Equity, Inclusion, and the Right to Urban Water Services
Chapter 12: Financing, Asset Management, and Delivery Capacity
Chapter 13: Data, Digital Systems, and Decision Intelligence
Chapter 14: Planning and Implementing Integrated Urban Water Strategies
Chapter 15: Comparative Synthesis—What Transfers, What Does Not, and Why
- Conclusion
Governing the Urban Water System as a Shared Public Endeavor
For readers turning evidence into action.
City and catchment planners
Public officials and planners connecting land use, drainage, ecosystems, infrastructure, and service access across administrative boundaries.
Infrastructure finance and policy professionals
Practitioners assessing funding, decision rights, risk allocation, affordability, and accountability across integrated urban water investments.
Researchers and graduate students
Readers examining comparative urban water evidence, institutional mechanisms, and the conditions governing transfer between cities.
Robert C. Brears
Robert C. Brears is the founder and editor-in-chief of Global Climate Solutions. His work connects climate resilience, water security, nature-based solutions, sustainable finance and the transition to more resilient cities and industries.
View author profile →Publication information.
- Format
- EPUB · Paperback
- Edition
- First Edition
- Publication
- 2026
- Publisher
- Our Future Water
- eBook ISBN
- 978-1-991406-24-8
- Paperback ISBN
- 978-1-991406-25-5
- Language
- en-US
Explore the subject.
Integrated water servicesCatchment and land-use planningUrban resilienceEquity and affordabilityInfrastructure finance and accountability
Read the book
Integrated Urban Water Management
Cities cannot secure reliable water services by improving individual projects alone. Decisions about supply, drainage, land use, finance, and public accountability must work together over time.
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