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The Iwater Forum combines resilience, governance and financing as the three main cornerstones that will enable us to move forward in water management in the medium term and guarantee its future supply. The three-day event (15-17 November) will host some 30 sessions and eight round tables. In the words of Ángel Simón, the president of Iwater and deputy CEO of SUEZ, in charge of Water Europe, the forum ‘will be the ideal place for upholding the true value of water as an essential element for society to function and a key economic agent for sustainable growth.’.

According to the OECD, 40% of the world’s population live in areas of hydric stress and water demand is set to increase by 55% by 2050. To tackle the lack of water resources we need formulas that change the way we consume water and promote the reuse of water for urban, industrial and agricultural use. At the same time, we need flexible governance systems that can be adapted to every region and every timescale, encompassing all the social, sectorial and institutional stakeholders involved in the water cycle. It is also essential to get access to new sources of finance to renovate and update water supply networks and sewerage infrastructures. All of this will be explored in depth at the Iwater Forum.

The general manager of Agua, Liana Sandra Ardiles, will be opening the Forum, which features speakers from the public administration, the academic world and water management professionals from different countries. Meanwhile, the local perspective and the challenges facing the water sector in Spain will be discussed at various round tables involving national experts, companies, associations and organisations.

Some of the issues on the table will be the true value of water; urban resilience; public-private partnerships; regulation; financing of infrastructures; the cost of non-sustainability; and the challenges and opportunities of reusing potable and non-potable water. At the end of each day, Enrique Cabrera, a professor and expert in urban hydraulics and director of the Water Technology Institute, will sum up the main conclusions of the issues discussed at the different sessions.

Several presentations at the Iwater Forum will focus on resilience; in other words, the ability to control and overcome adverse situations such desertification, droughts and floods, and its relevance to water management in cities, agriculture and industry, the three sectors that account for the highest consumption of this resource. In this respect, the director of Water Production for Orange County Water in California, Mehul Patel, will explain their experiences of indirect potable water reuse; professor, economist and politician Jaime Lamo de Espinosa will put forward the viewpoint of agriculture; and experts from the civil engineering schools of Paris and Lisbon and the Directorate-General of Water from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment will focus on resilience in the cities of southern Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Case studies will include examples of how cities such as Barcelona, Lisbon and Paris are implementing resilience.

To guarantee a supply of water of sufficient quality and quantity, it will be essential to establish governance systems that are capable of coordinating the different actors involved. The Iwater Forum will make a comparison between mainly private systems and publicly managed systems, and will examine the model that is currently prevalent in Spain which is a mixture of the two. It will also address the matter of regulation, with examples such as the United Kingdom, Portugal and Italy, which have opted for a single central regulatory body in contrast to the marked local model used in Spain.

This section will feature presentations by the general manager of the Danish Water and Waste Water Association, Carl-Emil Larsen; the president of the European Water Regulators Association (WAREG), Alberto Biancardi; and the former president of the Portuguese Waster Services Regulation Authority (ERSAR), Jaime Melo Baptista, amongst others.

Finally, discussions at Iwater will also address the planning of new financing formulas to fund both the renovation of obsolete infrastructures and the construction of new ones. Presentations will be made on the possibilities of public-private investment and the diversity of financing options used for infrastructures in other countries, mainly Latin America, as well as Morocco and India. Notable speakers include the principal administrator at the OECD Environment Directorate, Xavier Leflaive, and the deputy director of the Latin American Development Bank (CAF), Gonzalo de Castro.

The scientific coordinator of the programme and president of the European Water Technology Platform, Tomas Michel, points to a fourth challenge for improving integrated water cycle management in addition to resilience, governance and financing: ‘turning water into another element of the real economy, recognising its true value and making efforts to meet the needs of people (in cities), food production (in agriculture) and factories (in industry). To do so, we need regions and users to stop competing for water and move on to investing and collaborating in new relations where everyone is a winner,’ concludes Michel.

The Iwater Forum enjoys the support of the International Water Association (IWA) the global organisation that promotes knowledge and research to resolve water issues from a standpoint of sustainability.