Extreme events: being prepared for the pitfalls with progressing sustainable urban water management.

It is widely accepted that new, more sustainable approaches to urban water management are required if cities and ecosystems are to become resilient to the effects of growing urban populations and global warming. Climate change predictions show that it is likely that cities around the world will be subject to an increasing number of extreme and less predictable events including flooding and drought. Historical transition studies have shown that major events such as extremes can expedite the adoption of new practices by destabilising existing management regimes and opening up new windows of opportunity for change. Yet, they can also act to reinforce and further entrench old practices. This case study of two Australian cities responding to extreme water scarcity reveals that being unprepared for extremes can undermine progress towards sustainable outcomes. The results showed that despite evidence of significant progress towards sustainable urban water management in Brisbane and Melbourne, the extreme water scarcity acted to reinforce traditional practices at the expense of emerging sustainability niches. Drawing upon empirical research and transitions literature, recommendations are provided for developing institutional mechanisms that are able to respond proactively to extreme events and be a catalyst for SUWM when such opportunities for change arise.

Urban water management in cities: historical, current and future regimes.

Drawing from three phases of a social research programme between 2002 and 2008, this paper proposes a framework for underpinning the development of urban water transitions policy and city-scale benchmarking at the macro scale. Through detailed historical, contemporary and futures research involving Australian cities, a transitions framework is proposed, presenting a typology of six city states, namely the 'Water Supply City', the 'Sewered City', the 'Drained City', the 'Waterways City', the 'Water Cycle City', and the 'Water Sensitive City'. This framework recognises the temporal, ideological and technological contexts that cities transition through when moving towards sustainable urban water conditions. The aim of this research is to assist urban water managers with understanding the scope of the hydro-social contracts currently operating across cities in order to determine the capacity development and cultural reform initiatives needed to effectively expedite the transition to more sustainable water management and ultimately to Water Sensitive Cities. One of the values of this framework is that it can be used by strategists and policy makers as a heuristic device and/or the basis for a future city state benchmarking tool. From a research perspective it can be an underpinning framework for future work on transitions policy research.