This entry explores how foresight approaches can guide the future of water infrastructures. It highlights key long-term disruptive drivers of change—such as climate change, digital transformation, and geopolitical tensions—that infrastructures must withstand and adapt to. It also emphasizes the role of collective choices and innovation alliances, including Water-Oriented Living Labs, in shaping resilient and sustainable water systems. The focus is on transforming today’s infrastructures into adaptive systems that ensure water security and ecosystem integrity for future generations. Although many of the drivers of change are global, this entry emphasizes the European context, where policy frameworks and innovation agendas are currently shaping infrastructure transitions.

Few scientific publications discuss the vision of the water-smart society. Our paper addresses this gap, outlining key principles of urban water–smartness and translating them into five strategic objectives to support decision-making at the local government level. Based on recent literature and dialogue with six European water Living Labs, we argue that the water-smart society must highlight societal well-being and co-development across sectors. Furthermore, we emphasize the need for a long-term perspective, conserving nature, and maximising ecosystem services, while anticipating change. Finally, we discuss how a more grounded conceptualisation of the water-smart society can guide utilities and urban policy design.

In regions with a strong seasonal or interannual asymmetry in the distribution of precipitation and higher frequency of droughts, collective irrigation systems are vital infrastructures for agricultural activity. Although operating for decades, several systems have ageing infrastructures, with relevant water losses and pumping energy inefficiencies. Consequently, the systems are not adequately designed or operated to meet current and future water demand. Therefore, rehabilitation to improve water and energy efficiency while ensuring infrastructure, economic sustainability and service quality is crucial. In this sense, comprehensive approaches using performance assessment to support the planning process or benchmarking between water users associations play an essential role in improving efficiency in collective irrigation systems. However, few methodologies assess interdependencies between water losses, energy efficiency, infrastructure condition, service quality, economic and operational dimensions. Additionally, these approaches rarely were applied to the different stages of the planning process (diagnosis, planning, monitoring, and reviewing the impact of measures) and to different types of collective irrigation systems (gravity, pressurised, combined) for comparative analysis. This paper presents a comprehensive performance assessment system (PAS) for diagnosis and decision support about measures to improve water and energy efficiency in collective irrigation systems. Afterwards, the PAS is applied for diagnosis and prioritisation of alternatives to enhance the efficiency of a gravity system. The results indicate significant water losses due to the canal and intermediate reservoirs discharges and leakage in canals and low-pressure pipes, related to network ageing and insufficient flow monitoring and control for the gravity system. Ranking allowed identifying the gravity network area with high priority of intervention due to poor performance in non-revenue water, water losses due to discharges, energy efficiency of pumping stations and system energy in excess. Several alternatives were studied for this network area, and infrastructural solutions involving canal rehabilitation and water discharge control significantly impact global performance improvement besides the substantial investment associated. Subsequently, the PAS is used for comparing gravity and pressurised systems. In opposition to gravity, the pressurised system, with efficient use of water resources, presents a poor performance in pumping energy efficiency. Furthermore, the significant energy costs indicate the importance of energy improvement measures for the pressurised system. Besides assessing water and energy efficiency, the novel PAS may help managers and policymakers identify every system's best practices and weak points.

Public water supply, urban wastewater and stormwater management, and urban waste management are structural public services, essential to well-being, public health, and the safety of populations as well as to economic activities and environmental protection. These services must be guided by principles of universal access, continuity and quality of service, and efficiency and fairness of applied tariffs. The main concern of the regulation of these services is the protection of the interests of the users through the promotion of the quality of the service provided by the water utilities and the guarantee of balance in the practiced tariffs, materialized in the principles of universality, equity, reliability, and cost-efficiency. The quality of the urban water services has been assessed by ERSAR (the Portuguese regulator) since 2004, when the first generation of the assessment system was developed, and has undergone three periodical critical revisions. The fourth generation, developed in 2021, entered in force in 2022. This paper presents the fourth generation of ERSAR’s system for assessing the quality of urban water services in Continental Portugal, focusing on the path followed and addressing the experience of its application over almost two decades, the lessons learned, and the new challenges for the water sector.

Many collective irrigation systems have been operating for decades, facing high degradation of existing infrastructures and huge water-energy efficiency problems. Predominantly composed of open canals, they have been partially or entirely converted into pressurised pipe systems, implying a considerable increase in energy consumption and operation and maintenance costs. Simple, easy-to-use, and comprehensive approaches for energy efficiency assessment in collective irrigation systems are needed for diagnosis and assisting decision-making on implementing adequate improvement measures. This research proposes and demonstrates an innovative approach based on the water and energy balances and performance indicators to assess the effect of water losses, network layout and operation, energy recovery, and equipment on energy efficiency. A novel methodology for energy balance calculation is proposed for open canal, pressurised and combined systems. The application to a real-life open canal system and network areas allowed the identification of efficiency problems mainly due to water losses in canals, followed by the dissipated energy in friction losses. Less critical are pumping and manoeuvring equipment inefficiencies. Also, a considerable excess of gravity energy is recovered in hydropower plants. In raising pipe systems, in which shaft input energy predominates and costs for pumping play a key role, surplus and dissipated energy in friction losses are the most relevant issues. Significant energy is lost in the water conveyance and distribution in both systems. Consequently, the potential to improve energy efficiency through water loss management, network layout, and operation improvement, besides pumping and manoeuvring equipment replacement, is considerable.

Urban water systems (UWSs) are energy-intensive worldwide, particularly for drinking-water pumping and aeration in wastewater treatment. Usual approaches to improve energy efficiency focus only on equipment and disregard the UWS as a continuum of stages from source-to-tap-to-source (abstraction/transport—treatment—drinking water transport/distribution—wastewater and stormwater collection/transport—treatment—discharge/reuse). We propose a framework for a comprehensive assessment of UWS energy efficiency and a four-level approach to enforce it: overall UWS (level 1), stage (level 2), infrastructure component (level 3) and processes/equipment (level 4). The framework is structured by efficiency and effectiveness criteria (an efficient but ineffective infrastructure is useless), earlier and newly developed performance indicators and reference values. The framework and the approach are the basis for a sound diagnosis and intervention prioritising, and are being tested in a peer-to-peer innovation project involving 13 water utilities (representing 17% of the energy consumption by the Portuguese water sector in 2017). Results of levels 1–3 of analysis herein illustrated for a water utility demonstrate the framework and approach potential to assess UWS effectiveness and energy efficiency, and to select the stages and infrastructures for improvement and deeper diagnosis.

Typically, large-scale irrigation systems are built almost entirely in a short time-frame, a significant part of the assets age at the same time and concentrated investment needs for rehabilitation are predictable. This paper focuses on planning these needs in an aggregated way, providing a big picture for the long term investment plan. A methodology for this purpose was developed and applied to a large-scale irrigation utility in Portugal. For such, the following steps were taken: (i) system breakdown by functional areas; (ii) infrastructure components disaggregation; (iii) diagnosis of the reference situation; (iv) evaluation of long-term alternatives for rehabilitation investment planning. The methodology is in line with the IAM approach recommended by IWA and the ISO55000 standards. In this paper, the specificities of this particular application, namely a proposal of irrigation component classes, and the studied alternatives, are presented. As an overall result, it was possible to indicate a path for economic sustainability without committing the infrastructure sustainability: it is based on gradual replacement of the assets reaching their useful life, combined with a constant rehabilitation rate. This paper is a contribution to an AM system for irrigation utilities, so alignment with IAM and the contribution to a broader IAM system is highlighted.

Urban water supply, wastewater and storm water services (globally, water services) are essential to society. The lack of permanent, safe, and respondent services has inevitable consequences on public health and the well-being of communities, on the economy, and on the environment. Goal 6 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) recognizes this; failing to meet it necessarily affects the accomplishment of many of the other SDGs. Water services’ provision depends on expensive and long-lasting physical assets. Managing them strategically (e.g., according to the international standards on asset management, series ISO 55x and to the IWA recommendations on infrastructure asset management) is, therefore, fundamental for sustainable societies. Countries need to have sound public policies that enable asset management of water infrastructure. Portugal is a paradigmatic case. This paper elaborates on key government goals, on why asset management is important to meet them, and on key building blocks that a coherent public policy should consider in order to enable asset management of water infrastructure. It also presents how Portugal has been implementing this process, addressing the challenges that need to be overcome.

Apesar da qualidade de serviço assegurada atualmente pelos sistemas de abastecimento de água (SAA) em Portugal, o valor de água não faturada nos sistemas em “baixa” tem-se mantido praticamente constante e com desempenho insatisfatório nos últimos anos. O balanço hídrico constitui um standard para avaliar a água entrada, o consumo faturado e não faturado em SAA. A quantificação fiável das componentes de água não faturada, para identificação dos principais problemas de perdas, constitui uma etapa preliminar crucial para a definição de um plano de gestão de perdas de água e de energia a médio prazo. No entanto, devido ao facto de várias componentes do balanço serem obtidas por estimativa, são necessárias abordagens que permitam o seu cálculo sistemático e uma avaliação da qualidade dos resultados com vista à redução das incertezas e a uma melhor avaliação da dimensão do problema. Este artigo analisa a incerteza das componentes do balanço hídrico, identifica alguns fatores que podem influenciar a qualidade da medição da água entrada e faz uma análise de sensibilidade ao indicador de perdas aparentes num conjunto de 22 entidades gestoras de sistemas de distribuição de água. Despite the high quality of service provided nowadays by drinking water supply systems in Portugal, the value of non-revenue water in drinking water distribution systems (DWDS) has been practically constant and with a poor service level in last years. The water balance is a standard for assessing system input volume, billed consumption and non-revenue water components in DWDS. Reliable quantification of non-revenue water components, for identification of the main problems, is an essential preliminary step in the definition of a plan for water loss and energy management in a medium-term horizon. However, because several components of the water balance are obtained by estimation, approaches are necessary to enable them to be systematically calculated and to evaluate the quality of results to reduce uncertainties and to better assess the water loss problems. This paper analyses the uncertainty associated with water balance components and the results of the apparent loss performance indicator in a set of 22 DWDS to establish reference values.

This paper presents the development and application of a comprehensive methodology for the systematic water balance calculation in collective irrigation systems (CIS), applicable to pressurized pipelines or open canals. Existing approaches focus solely on the assessment the water resources use efficiency of CIS single components (e.g., leakage in some canal reaches), without a system-wide approach. A water balance approach allows accounting for the different system volume inputs (i.e., water abstraction, imported water, water volume due to precipitation or surface runoff), authorized and non-authorized consumptions and water losses either in canal, mixed or pressurized CIS, which has never been presented in literature. The proposed methodology allows the assessment of different water loss components (i.e., evaporation losses, unauthorized uses, metering errors, leakage and discharges) and the calculation of water loss performance indicators that allow the identification of the main problems in terms of water losses and provides guidance about measures to control water losses. Although based on the existing and consolidated water balance schemes specifically developed for urban water supply systems, the proposed methodology includes novel components in terms of system input volume, authorized consumption and water loss that are specific of CIS. The methodology is tested and applied to a mixed collective irrigation system. Results show that the water losses due to discharges in canal systems can be one of the most relevant component of the non-revenue water, representing approximately half of its total volume, followed by leakage in canals and metering errors. These results highlight the importance of improving daily operation of these systems and also rehabilitating ageing infrastructures.

Water losses are responsible for increased energy consumption in water supply systems (WSS). The energy associated with water losses (EWL) is typically considered to be proportional to the water loss percentage obtained in water balances. However, this hypothesis is yet to be proved since flow does not vary linearly with headlosses in WSS. The aim of this paper is to validate the hypothesis, present real-life values for water-energy balance (WEB) components, and reference values for the key performance indicator that represents the ratio of total energy in excess (E3). This validation is achieved through the application of two approachestop-down and bottom-up. The first approach requires minimum data, gives an overview of the main WEB components, and provides an effective diagnosis of energy inefficiencies through the calculation of E3 related to pumps, water losses, and networks. The second approach requires calibrated hydraulic models and provides a detailed assessment of the WEB components. Results allow the validation of the stated hypothesis as well as show that the most significant energy inefficiencies are associated with surplus energy, pumping, and water losses, each reaching up to 40% of total input energy. Less significant components are pipe friction and valve headlosses, each reaching up to 15% of total input energy.

Over the last two decades, remarkable progress in the Portuguese drinking water and wastewater services sector has been achieved. Nevertheless, it faces a serious challenge in trying to ensure long-term sustainability. There is equally scope for considerable efficiency and effectiveness gains. The national strategic plan for the period 2014–2020 has assigned a prominent role to infrastructure asset management (IAM) in the paradigm shift required in water services. This paper discusses the progress made, the critical issues and the challenges faced by the Portuguese water sector regarding IAM, based on a comparative analysis of international and national contexts. Various worldwide initiatives are presented. The main drivers to start using IAM were quite diverse. In Portugal, legislation initially contributed to attracting the attention of the sector to IAM, but LNEC, a research institute, has played a leading role in this process. The water services regulator has also been playing a very important role. The highly fragmented structure, the politicised nature of municipal water utility management and the existing accounting procedures are some of the main barriers to the spread of IAM best practices. The sector's ongoing restructuring and the new tariff regulation will be key enabling opportunities and challenges in coming years.

Water utilities are aware of the water-energy loss relevance in supply systems. However, they still mainly focus on daily water loss control (real and apparent losses), without considering the impact on embedded energy. Moreover, they are mostly concerned with the economic dimension and, in most cases, tend to disregard the impact that water-energy loss may have on the quality of service, communication with the consumers, social awareness, water quality and environment. This paper focuses on the application of the developed and tested AWARE-P infrastructure asset management (IAM) methodology to improve water-energy loss management in water supply systems, while demonstrating the main benefits from implementing an integrated approach for water losses and related energy assessment. Results show that indeed the participating iPerdas utilities were able to define tactical measures leading to a more efficient and sustainable service.

This paper presents a novel energy balance scheme and performance indicators for assessing energy efficiency in water supply systems. This assessment consists of a three-step procedure: system characterisation and data collection, energy balance calculation and energy performance indicators assessment. The main innovation is the integrated approach between energy and water balances allowing the quantification of energy inefficiencies directly associated with water losses. Comprehensive energy performance indicators can be calculated by utilities with different maturity levels allowing a fair comparison of energy efficiency between systems with different layouts and operational schemes. This energy balance scheme has been applied by 17 water utilities in Portugal. Results have shown that systems provide more than twice the minimum energy necessary to supply their consumers and, consequently, there is a significant energy saving potential: 40% through water loss reduction, 30% for changes in network operation and layout and 30% for pump inefficiency reduction.

Human resources are one of the most important assets of water utilities (WUs), being responsible for assuring systems management and playing an important role in the tacit forms of organizational knowledge. In organizations with responsibility for managing extensive, diverse infrastructure with long life-cycles, with adequate service and acceptable risk levels, knowledge transfer between peers should be assured to maintain a stable human resources framework. In WUs, strategic asset management should include the long-term planning of human resources alongside urban water infrastructure assets, to ensure service sustainability. Based on these assumptions and driven by the legal obligations in developing infrastructure asset management plans, Administração e Gestão de Sistemas de Salubridade, S.A. (AGS) created and implemented a novel personnel aging index (PAI) with the main goal of evaluating the human resources framework, including employee ages and professional categories, and the remaining time needed to transfer knowledge to new members of staff. This paper describes AGS' approach to human resources management under the asset management policy and PAI's formulation. A case study with 10 AGS WUs is presented, aiming to evaluate their teams' maturity level and allowing comparison between WUs.

Many national and regional administrations are currently facing challenges to ensure long-term sustainability of urban water services, as infrastructures continue to accumulate alarming levels of deferred maintenance and rehabilitation. The infrastructure value index (IVI) has proven to be an effective tool to support long-term planning, in particular by facilitating the ability to communicate and to create awareness. It is given by the ratio between current value of an infrastructure and its replacement cost. Current value is commonly estimated according to an asset-oriented approach, which is based on the concept of useful life of individual components. The standard values assumed for the useful lives can vary significantly, which leads to valuations that are just as different. Furthermore, with water companies increasingly focused on the customer, effective service-centric asset management is essential now more than ever. This paper shows results of on-going research work, which aims to explore a service-oriented approach for assessing the IVI. The paper presents the fundamentals underlying this approach, discusses and compares results obtained from both perspectives and points to challenges that still need to be addressed.