Achieving Urban Water Security: a Review of Water Management Approach from Technology Perspective

The term water security (WS) shows an overwhelming superiority in both policy and academic circles. Firstly, the paper reviews the multiple interpretations of WS. Specifically, we emphasize that urban water security (UWS), as one of the human sustainable development goal, consists of three pillars: water resources security focusing on water scarcity issue; water environment security focusing on water pollution issue, and water disasters security focusing on water-related hazards and vulnerability issue. Secondly, it compares and contrasts the development backgrounds and properties of three water management approaches to UWS--integrated water management, adaptive water management, and intelligence-based water management (skill and equipment intensive). Thirdly, it mainly discusses the development situation of smart water grid and lessons learned from intelligent (smart) water management. Finally, this paper presents the achievements and challenges of the water management approaches. Although every water management approach has its own advantages and disadvantages, our comparison can provide a map for water policy makers and stockholder companies to guide the future development of water management and realizing UWS.