SWITCH Sustainable Water management Improves Tomorrow's Cities' Health
The SWITCH Project aims to contribute to the development of efficient, sustainable and interactive urban water systems and services by developing an integrated, flexible and strategic approach towards sustainable urban water management, which builds on a thorough understanding of limitations and unsustainability factors of conventional urban water management systems and demonstrating a range of tested scientific, technological and socio-economic solutions and approaches to urban water management.
SWITCH is funded by the EU and will run from 2006-2010.
The 30 SWITCH partners are working under the following main themes: Paradigm Shift and Knowledge Management, Urban water supply, Storm water management, Eco-sanitation, Productive (Re)use of water. Switch will implement pilot and demonstration projects in 14 cities.
SWITCH applies a Learning Alliances framework in which various organisations with a shared interest in improving urban water management cooperate in a number of structured platforms at different institutional levels (national, river basin, city, community etc). These platforms bring together a wide range of partners with capabilities in implementation; regulation; policy and legislation; research and documentation and dissemination and are designed to break down barriers to both horizontal and vertical information sharing, and thus to speed up the process of identification, adaptation, and uptake of new innovations.
ETC is coordinating the Work Package on Urban Agriculture (part of the theme Productive reuse of water) in which it collaborates with IWMI in Accra Ghana, IGSNRR in Beijing and IPES in Lima, Peru as well as with NRI (UK) and IRC (the Netherlands). The objectives of this Work Package are:
- To develop a better understanding of -and promote benefits associated with- the role, contributions and potential of urban agriculture and other productive uses of water (along the water chain) to people's livelihoods in the selected pilot cities;
- To establish multi-stakeholder working-groups in each city that engage civil society (e.g. NGOs, CBOs, farmers) with municipal agencies (e.g. policy-makers, legislative and planning authorities), researchers and the private sector, on the integration of productive use of water in urban planning;
- To train members of the working groups and other key players in multi-stakeholder approaches, and to develop local skills and capacity in key agricultural (& other livelihood activities) and water management areas;
- To identify and integrate acceptable and appropriate urban water management approaches and strategies into the policy, legislative and regulatory, urban planning and decision-making frameworks of each city;
- To initiate and monitor at least two pilot projects in each of these cities on productive use of water including freshwater, storm and waste water;
- To disseminate and promote the lessons learnt within the cities and on national and international levels through multiple media channels (workshops, internet, etc) and demonstrations.
Funding: EU, Integrated Programme, FP 6.
Contact: René van Veenhuizen (r.van.veenhuizen@etcnl.nl)