Integrated water management (IWM) is critical for future-proofing growing cities against climate challenges. While cutting-edge technologies are available to harness water resources, governance innovation remains a key enabler for effective implementation.
Celeste Morgan, Victorian Water Professional of the Year and Arup Australasia Integrated Water Management Lead, highlights how reconnecting cities with their water cycles can unlock resilience and sustainable growth.
"Every city has an innate relationship with water. The reason for cities being where they are started with a water source or a port or a bay. We always want to be close to water,” she said.
"As we've developed over time, that relationship with water has sometimes become quite stretched, quite tense. We’ve evolved our approach to water to address those issues. We've broken up the water cycle into convenient parts to manage it effectively.
“Disconnecting the water cycle and only optimising to singular objectives has come back to bite us in a lot of ways.”
Morgan said that 90% of the climate impacts our society will experience will be felt through water, whether that's drought, flooding or heat waves, which require water to mitigate.
"Water is central to our urban future, and it's crucial that we address it in an interconnected way,” she said.
Populations are increasing and supply is becoming more limited due to climate change, but cities have many unharnessed water sources, Morgan said, leading to opportunities for resilience.
“Australia is the driest inhabited continent in the world, and water security is a huge issue for our cities. But our cities are actually major water generators,” she said.
"We generate huge quantities of stormwater that runs off our cities and we treat and discard vast volumes of wastewater. And those ‘urban waters’ have in the past been problems to be solved. But if we flip that and see those as opportunities for new water sources, then it's a massive circular economy opportunity.
"When our cities are growing, we're actually producing more and more water. This means we can actually grow in a more sustainable way if we move on the opportunity."
"To do that, we really need to rethink how we're structuring our water services, how we're integrating with development and urban growth, how can access those water sources where they are, reuse them and celebrate water."
While there’s already plenty of great technology to deploy to recycle urban water sources, Morgan said there is still a need to innovate with governance around implementation and management.
"One thing Victoria has done well is actually tackle the governance that sits below IWM to embed long-term changes in thinking. And that journey started more than 10 years ago,” she said.
"The pivotal moment in policy was in 2017, when IWM was actually embedded into the water management framework for the state. One key action was creating IWM forums, which were a new governance framework.
"The idea [of the forums] was recognising that we've segmented the water cycle across organisations. And we needed a forum for all of those water managers to come together and decide on joint objectives for the water cycle and for IWM.
"By going through the process of developing catchment-scale IWM plans, Melbourne was able to bring together people to rethink what we want for the city."
Morgan said that while technology is often considered the most difficult aspect of innovation to get right, collaboration is actually much more tricky and potentially more important.
"Collaboration is hard. It takes more time. And it can put people off when they're on deadlines," Morgan said.
"But avoiding it means missing the opportunity to drive multiple objectives at the same time. This approach ends up being more efficient when it comes to the outcomes.
"Once we change the governance, we unlock changes in funding. If we add in the water pollution benefits, the local greening, the community education benefits, then working together to achieve more really does make sense."
Leaning into governance innovation doesn't mean forgetting the use of digital tools entirely, Morgan said: "Digital tools can really help us come from the ground up. They help us engage communities better about their water story”.
"If we move towards more decentralised water systems, understanding water is a really powerful tool to drive water stewardship within communities,” she said.
"It's really helpful to utilise digital tools to drive water literacy but also to do smarter planning at the big picture scale, as well."
Morgan said IWM is an active, ongoing process that requires tailored, place-based solutions rather than a one-size-fits-all approach: “It’s not a static object but a process”.
"IWM needs to be a place-based response, effectively. It's a process of how we think about water in our cities and the solutions we come up with will always be unique to that place,” she said.
"We've got to understand what the local landscape needs are, what the local community needs are and what the local water cycle is to find those right solutions."
Learn more about cutting-edge approaches to integrated water management by exploring the Integrated Planning Stream in the Ozwater’25 Program. Register now to be part of the conversation driving Australia’s sustainable water future.