Integrated Urban Water Management

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Integrated Urban Water Management (IUWM) is a sub-field of the discipline of Ecological Engineering.

The IUWM field focuses on the integrated management of technical aspects of water services. This is a new field that has emerged as a direct result of conclusions drawn by international and local agencies that sanitation, waste disposal, urban stormwater and runoff, water reticulation, etc. cannot be considered to be standalone issues as they have in the past.

In the IUWM approach consideration is given to the collective impact of all possible water-related urban processes (of which the management of human excreta or sewage is only one) on issues such as human health, environmental protection, quality of receiving waters and urban water demand. Individual processes are then planned and managed in a way that the collective impact, with due consideration of the interaction among processes, is optimised as far as possible.