Each subtheme delves into a different water-related topic and highlights the most important issues. For the subtheme Risk and Resilience the following focus points are highlighted.
- Adaptive & resilient design of water infrastructure: water quality, flooding, and drought
- Early warning systems for high disaster-risk prone regions & availability of data
- Financial systems to strengthen dealing with risk preparedness
Current progression around waste treatment, reclaim, reuse and recycling of resources has paved the groundwork to implement resource recovery ideas. Pharmaceutical, other chemical waste disposal, bacteriological pollution and virus transmission, especially in recent COVID-19 times, has unmasked the flaws in existing water circulation and distribution systems. Regarding the increasing droughts the need for reclaiming of wastewater is getting more and more important.
Local and decentralised solutions for drinking water production and distribution, wastewater treatment and technological advances in making water bodies and sources swimmable and drinkable, is the current progress with a potential positive impact. Furthering agenda of sub-theme 1 regarding ecosystem restoration; such community-led local solutions can support in implementation and scalable actions. Water utilisation for food production and the consequences of generated wastewater; can be reused with water efficient technologies and tools and fed back into the system.
Water, energy, communities and food production are closely related and inter-dependent. Waste reuse and recycling in food production sector, responsible chemical consumption and disposal, efficient irrigation technologies and systems can further the progress in efficient resource use. Thus, in this sub-theme the focus is to build and share practices around resource use efficiency, recycling and recovery within water-food and energy sectors.