Sustainable Hybrid Water Systems Toolkit for Towns and Small Cities

Sustainable Hybrid Water Systems

Objective

• The main objective of this project is to create a detailed, user-friendly toolkit and dashboard for large towns and smaller cities to plan and implement sustainable hybrid water systems (SHS). SHS are defined as systems that leverage groundwater, surface water, rainwater, and recycled water through a combination of borewells, networks, and larger reservoirs (tanks, reservoirs) that delivers 24 x 7 fit-for-purpose water at the lowest financial, energy, and net water inflow (from outside the ecosystem) cost. As part of this toolkit we will develop an assessment tool that will provide decision-relevant metrics on energy requirement, environmental impact, and cost for SHS for key stakeholders including households, utilities and other providers, planners, and regulators.

Description

• A town of the sponsor's choice will be selected as the basis for developing and piloting the use of the proposed toolkit. The requisite data for the selected town such as rainfall, surface water and ground water availability, population data and usage, infrastructure available, lifetime cost of building new infrastructure systems etc. will be obtained through field trip surveys and existing available information. Different possible hybrid strategies for water supply will be assessed in collaboration with stakeholders.

Impact

• A toolkit which will include both technical and institutional information: for example, guides to open-source and proprietary planning software, content management systems with guidelines on information for planning, checklists for assessing the water governance needs from planning to enforcement, as well as mini-case studies of relevant institutional successes and lessons from experiments in similar local government contexts.