How water sensitive and resilient is your city? Indicators and digital tools explored by the Water Sensitive City Partnership
The public consultation on the draft Action Plan (including Actions on indicators and digitalisation) has been extended to June 11, and you can share your feedback via the EU Survey.
Cities across Europe face growing pressure to manage water sustainably. However, the use of indicators and digital tools to support planning and measure progress towards becoming greater water sensitivity remains a significant challenge. A recent analysis of urban water indicators and digital tools by EUI expert Birgit Georgi-Haake has surfaced a number of important findings. First, it reveals a stronger focus in existing EU legislation on health and social impacts and water quality, while other dimensions of a water sensitive city are less represented. Second, in terms of digital tools, a positive finding is that the technology to measure urban water indicators already exists, and most of them can be measured by a few key technologies. Therefore, the challenge is not primarily technical, but institutional and financial. Often, digital solutions are deployed in isolation, data is collected without a clear link to planning and decision-making.
The core policy message is clear: indicators must drive decisions, not just measure outcomes. With digital tools largely available, the real barriers are governance, coordination, inclusive implementation, and financing.
Mapping indicators against EU regulations
To measure how water-sensitive a city is, a clear set of indicators is needed. Developing a ready-to-use WSC indicator set is the first Action proposed in the draft Action Plan of the Partnership and is led by the City of Enschede (NL). By selecting the most relevant indicators for public authorities, the Action aims to clarify which data matters for implementing water-sensitive approaches, and to guide local authorities in monitoring progress.
To support this process, the analysis identified the key WSC-relevant indicators and parameters included in EU directives and regulations, from the Water Framework Directive and the Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive to the Nature Restoration Regulation and the newly adopted Soil Monitoring Law.
Key findings from the analysis include:
- the analysis looked at five core dimensions of a water sensitive city; while all are covered to some degree, they are unevenly addressed: indicators for human health and social impacts and environmental quality of water bodies are strongly embedded in EU legislation; circular water management, drivers and pressures on urban water, and governance and implementation are less represented.
- current indicators are also fragmented across multiple directives and designed primarily for national-level reporting, making them poorly suited to local planning and decision-making.
A preliminary list of Water Sensitive City indicators is proposed for further elaboration. These indicators are structured across the five core dimensions, including: consumption, abstraction, leakage rate, stormwater retention, imperviousness of soils and urban greenspace coverage, amount of wastewater reuse, rainwater harvesting, water quality, access to water, flood risk, as well as local capacity and public participation. Find out more in this Briefing Note (Table 3). The full matrix of mapped indicators and digital tools to measure them can be consulted here.
Which are the key digital tools cities can use to track these indicators?
Digitalisation is a key enabler of better urban water management, supporting data collection, decision-making and progress tracking, while contributing to the water resilience and efficiency goals set out in the EU's Water Resilience Strategy, which aims to enhance water efficiency by at least 10% by 2030.
The analysis also looked at the availability of digital tools for measuring each WSC indicator, detailed in a second Briefing note. This work is linked with Action 5 led by Elche Municipality (ES), focused on designing a segmented water digitalisation standard for municipalities of all sizes. A relatively small set of mature technologies is sufficient to collect and sense the large majority of indicators, namely water quality sensors, smart water meters, groundwater monitoring sensors, and remote sensing / satellite observation data. Stormwater and flood-related monitoring are the most complex, requiring the combination of various digital solutions.
Expert Birgit Georgi-Haake structured the digital tools available into five steps, forming a data pipeline from measurement to decision: 1) data collection and sensing: (water quality sensors, smart water meters, groundwater monitoring sensors, remote sensing and satellite observation data), 2) transmission and integration (SCADA systems, IoT sensor networks and telemetry systems), 3) storage and infrastructure (cloud data platforms, data lakes, geospatial data infrastructures and urban data platforms where data is organised and managed), 4) analysis and modelling (hydrological models, AI analytics, statistical tools, hydraulic network models and digital twins that turn raw data into insight and forecasts), 5) visualisation and decision support (dashboards, GIS visualisation platforms, public transparency portals, decision support systems and scenario analysis platforms that communicate results and feed back into policy and planning).
How can cities plan and track progress towards becoming more water sensitive?
In terms of technological readiness, the tools required are largely available and proven. However, challenges related to data governance, interoperability, organisational capacity, and funding continue to limit their effective deployment. In many cases, data is collected without a clear link to decision-making, and responsibilities for data provision and management remain fragmented across administrative levels. Addressing these institutional conditions is therefore at least as important as ensuring technological availability. For cities, a pragmatic, tiered approach is recommended:
- start with a core set of proven and widely accessible tools (sensors for key variables, smart meters, basic modelling capabilities)
- prioritise data integration and interoperability
- make use of existing EU and other external data sources to reduce costs (such as the Copernicus Programme)
- strengthen skills and capacity
- invest in monitoring infrastructure and modelling at an intermediate stage
- more advanced systems, such as AI-based analytics or digital twins, should only be considered once sufficient data and institutional capacity are in place.
At national and EU level, identified needs include aligning indicator frameworks, accelerating standardisation and interoperability, embedding digitalisation more firmly in EU water policy, improving access to EU data services and better integration into local systems, and support for capacity building and funding. The ongoing work on indicators and tools opens a broader discussion on the feasibility of municipal-level measurement and indicators that may still be missing.
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