Webinar 8: Going Digital in Stormwater Management: Towards Water Sensitive Cities

 

School of Water and Waste at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE)  organised a webinar on Going Digital in Stormwater Management: Towards a Water Sensitive city for connecting the state of art research tools supporting innovative policy and practices from Europe – from PANDa atlas to WaterFolder.com : the first ever fully digital source of information about design rainfall intensities in Poland. This initiative has resulted Polish cities design and implement rainwater harvesting, stormwater management for sustainable water management and improved drainage systems to address flooding increasingly based on credible information about maximum precipitation. For abstract of webinar click here  

There were total 644 registrations from 181 cities across 30 countries and 572 registrations from India. More than 430 participants finally attended the event and a distinguished panel along with an interesting Q & A session.

Background
Today cities in India and across the global south face the enormous task of dealing with future growth with access to essential health care, better water management (including flooding) that has exacerbated the challenge of responding effectively to epidemics and diseases. While the impacts of COVID 19 are still being understood, but it does seem clear that this disruption will make cities (re) think - how we can plan more open spaces and infrastructures?  Will we make green and blue spaces/infrastructure front and center of our infrastructure investments to make cities more water resilient and plan for the next crisis.

Planning and designing of sustainable water and urban drainage infrastructure for India and other global south cities is dependent on the rainfall statistics. As the amount of rainfall in a city is not evenly distributed, cities require disaggregated spatial data for rainfall in order to appropriately design drainage infrastructure. Thus, a city-level rainfall atlas is the need for the hour.

This webinar gave an opportunity to learn and understand the model and explore possibilities to customize the model and prepare Spatial Rainfall Atlas for all Smart Cities in India, which can provide real-time information and forecasting for rainfall in cities. Furthermore, the model and atlas could also be used to develop flood warning systems and plan for rainwater harvesting (retention or detention for storage and use as well as groundwater recharge) and urban drainage in wake of climate change. Indian Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) set-up the India Urban Observatory (IUO) as part of Smart Cities Mission which and acts as a data analysis and management hub. The IUO can act as a repository of rainfall atlas for the cities.

Objective

• Mainstreaming water sensitive urban design and planning for creating blue-green infrastructure / spaces in India  and global south cities
• Promote digital stormwater management to help practitioners scale up rainwater harvesting and improved stormwater management to for sustainable water management (including  address urban flooding) in Indian smart cities
• Explore the potential and challenges in applicability of the Poland model (PANDa) in Indian and global south context.

 
Webinar Coordinator:

Shivali Jainer
Programme Manager, Water Programme, CSE
Email: shivali@cseindia.org