Flood resilience and smart water management : implementation strategies for smart cities

The key aims of this thesis are to identify the challenges and strategies for implementing Flood Resilience and Smart Water Management (SWM) solutions at both the policy and field level to for efficient water management. In the next decade, more than 4 billion people worldwide will be living in areas of water scarcity and more than two thirds of the world’s population will face water-stressed conditions. This future water shortage requires immediate action on development of resources, reduction of demand and higher efficiency in treatment and transmission. In addition, future flood risk management requires immediate action in risk assessment, defence and alleviation systems, forecasting and warning systems and institutional and governance measures. And with the climate change impacts, extreme events will be more frequent and severe. As a result, there is a necessity to adopt alternative strategies rather than the traditional predict-and-prevent approach which mainly focuses on reducing the probability of occurrence of disturbances; where this type of approach often led to an extensive construction of protection dykes, flood defences and other structural solutions along river channels and floodplains, creating a false sense of safety, which increases the vulnerability to the consequences of possible floods. The first half of the thesis explores the various applications of flood resilience strategies and the available solutions that are and can be implemented to mitigate flood impacts. It also examines the effectiveness of flood resilience solutions through hydrological hydraulic simulations of a real case study in South Korea. From the analysis, recommendations and strategies are developed where it is found that Smart Water Management is an enabler for the implementation for Flood Resilience solutions and has great synergy with Flood Resilience concepts. The second half of the thesis explores the concept of Smart Water Management and discusses the technologies required for the implementation and their challenges and limitations. Successful case studies of smart water solution implementations are investigated and used to validate the direction and action plans for the implementation of smart water solutions. In addition, a framework for the implementation of Smart Water System for an urban city, which includes the water demand system and water supply system, as well as a leakage detection indicator for water supply system are proposed. Finally, it discusses the importance of smart city connections between the different domains of a smart city with the smart water system and how these connections occur within the smart water system.