Urban water solutions

The Amsterdam International Water Week (AIWW) is a global movement towards a sustainable water environment. This biennial event gathers experts from cities, industries, and utilities from all over the world to combine real-life water cases with innovative solutions. And so creating a circular and resilient water environment in high-density living areas.

Changing the way we look at our water-related risks – finding new approaches – is something that cannot be achieved overnight. Case owners, experts, suppliers, and investors signing an Amsterdam Agreement, pledge to continue their work in the coming years until they have reached their goals, in order to achieve real breakthroughs.

Four sub-themes

The central theme is Blue-Green deals with integrated solutions, including four sub-themes:

• Clean Water and Ecosystem Restoration
  Long-term degradation of water quality and quantity reduction, lowering ground water levels, concretised water replenishment areas, over-extraction of services, natural processes and cycles have negatively impacted.
  Different nature-based solutions have proved to be a potential solution for reducing future risks and challenges and contribute to achieve clean water and ecosystem restoration.
• Reuse, Recycle and Recover
  Local and decentralised solutions for drinking water production and distribution, wastewater treatment and technological advances in making water bodies, sources and streams swimmable and drinkable, is the current progress with a potential positive impact.
  Building towards locally resourced and implemented solutions, sharing best practices, lessons learned and resource-use efficiency achieved can further push sectors towards environment-friendly solutions and resilient ecosystems.
• Risk and Resilience
  Flooding, high sediment load etc. can often damage the water infrastructures and can lead to high repair costs, making the services suffer thereby lowering investments in repair, maintenance and rehabilitation of the system.
  New innovations and solutions are experimented, implemented and institutionalised; recovery and retrofitting of old infrastructures and can provide short-term solutions,
• Community engagement and inter-sectoral collaboration
  Building awareness, capacity strengthening and inclusion of data-driven and innovative solutions can help build trust among the stakeholders, communities, organisations and youth organisations.
  Future climate risks, degrading environment and natural processes require a collaborative and integrated approach. Consumer centric infrastructural and systemic solutions for example in water pricing and tariff settings can be a step forward to begin with.

Three major events

The Amsterdam International Water combines three major events. First, there is the international conference with its meeting for future water leaders and young water professionals. Furthermore, the event reports on the progress of the Amsterdam Agreements, the partnerships that implement transformative solutions for the global water agenda. The third pillar is the Aquatech Amsterdam trade fair on water technology.

The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management are supporters of the AIWW, through the Partners for Water programme.