Welcome to the 9th Water Research Horizon Conference 2018 at Dresden!

 

Towards Blue Cities and their Environs

 

An effective water management in urban areas is one of the most pressing global challenges. Addressing it requires new approaches that extend far beyond the classical goals of sustaining drinking water supply and ensuring effective sanitation. Urban water management for the future must also accommodate such diverse issues as urban heat mitigation, groundwater depletion, urban agriculture, reuse of treated wastewater, water retention, freshwater ecosystem restoration, biodiversity conservation, urban recreation and general human well-being as vital elements of a development towards liveable cities.

 

Many individual components of urban water systems are well described and understood. However, current solutions to urban water issues continue to be primarily technological. While effective at ensuring water security for humans in industrial nations, they fall short of providing sufficient quantities of clean water to a large proportion of the world population and fail to address many of the other demands on urban water systems. To what extent nature-based solution can complement existing and future technologies to face these challenges is an open question. Thus, great strides could be made by developing integrative holistic concepts that consider the interlinkages between technical and ‘natural’ freshwater compartments, while specifically addressing the singularity of urban catchments and relations with their environs. This could be achieved by filling the gap between the technology-focused urban water management as practiced at present and modern river basin management, which tends to underappreciate the role of urban water systems.

 

The partner country of this year's Water Research Horizon Conference is China.

 

Water Science Alliance

The Water Science Alliance creates a platform providing efficient structures for integrated water research at the national and international level as well as bundling the existing water research competences along the lines of the most pressing challenges. The Water Research Horizon Conference with the Open Space Workshops was established as an important instrument of the Water Science Alliance, which is organised in cooperation with the Senate Commission on Water Research of the German Research Foundation (DFG-KoWa).

 

We cordially invite you to join our 9th Water Research Horizon Conference 2018 at Dresden!