Infrastructure planning for Urban Water Systems (UWSs) is challenged by, inter alia, increasing uncertainty in both demand and availability of water and aging infrastructure, and this is already impacting the climate-proofing of cities. In this context, the idea of resilience has been gradually embraced by the water sector, but the term itself is not yet universally defined, nor operationalised. Here, we propose a methodology to assess the resilience of a UWS, defining it as the degree to which the UWS continues to perform under increasing stress. A resilience assessment method is then proposed as a ‘stress-test’ of UWS configurations, under increasingly more stressful scenarios. We then demonstrate a toolbox assembled for the proposed analysis using, as a proof of concept, a semi-synthetic case study. Results are promising, suggesting that the approach could assist in the uptake and evolution of resilience thinking in strategic water infrastructure decision making, leading to water-wiser cities.

Underground water infrastructure can be vulnerable towards climate change. In previous research, correlations between weather parameters and pipe failure rates in the drinking water distribution systems (DWDS) of the Netherlands were found. Using the statistical relations between pipe failure frequencies and weather conditions, a methodology is proposed to assess the effect of climate change on the integrity of DWDSs. As the time scales of climate change are in the order of 50 years, the methodology has been set up to also incorporate the evolution of the DWDS.