2026 roadmap on sustainable water management

초록

Water is intrinsically entwined with multiple elements such as energy, food, resource (otherwise waste), greenhouse gas emissions, ecosystem, and land system, which make these complex interdependencies challengeable to manage at different regions and scales. This roadmap charts actionable pathways toward water-positive, waste-zero, and net-zero–aligned water resource management by treating water services as a coupled water–energy–waste–carbon system rather than a stand-alone infrastructure sector. It synthesizes current status, binding constraints, and deployment-ready interventions across treatment, reuse, resource recovery, agriculture, watershed management, and digital decision-support, with attention to technology readiness, institutional capacity, and regional feasibility. The roadmap emphasizes that many failures in water sustainability are not primarily technical but arise from governance, incentives, legitimacy, and data quality, and therefore integrates social-science insights on public acceptance, equity, and workforce development alongside engineering solutions. To move beyond aspirational recommendations, it proposes an auditable measurement framework, minimum indicators for water efficiency and security, energy intensity, greenhouse-gas emissions, materials circularity, and service equity, and outlines a phased implementation pathway (near-, mid-, and long-term) with stakeholder responsibilities and monitoring, reporting, and verification requirements. It also highlights cross-sector risks and trade-offs, including climate-driven volatility, emerging contaminants, cybersecurity, and the potential for burden shifting between water and energy decarbonization. By providing a systems-oriented structure for prioritization, scenario evaluation, and accountable deployment, this roadmap is intended to support policymakers, utilities, basin authorities, financiers, and researchers in designing credible, context-specific strategies that deliver resilient water services while advancing circular economy and climate goals. © 2026 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

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