Water BOOST Enabling Innovation for Future Ready Cities 2025

These dimensions are interwoven with a growing set of challenges – scarcity, excess, declining quality and inequitable allocation – and needs, including ecosystem protection, universal access and risk mitigation. As Figure 1 shows, many of these challenges converge at the end of the cycle, where waste-water treatment and reuse remain weak points for innovation.However, implementation lags behind ambition. Many cities still lack the enabling conditions to translate innovative intent into systemic change. This highlights the urgent need for methodologies that map water innovation ecosystems, reveal bottlenecks and guide context-specific action. Over the past two decades, the global water sector has seen a growing wave of tools, pilots and frameworks aimed at advancing urban water sustainability. Yet, despite this momentum, innovation efforts remain highly fragmented, often siloed across institutions, disciplines and geographical boundaries.21 Many initiatives focus on a single dimension of the water system – whether technical, environmental or financial – and as a result, struggle to support systems-based change or scale effectively across diverse governance and infrastructure contexts. In response to these limitations, newer conceptual approaches have begun to emerge. Urban water neutrality22 and water neutrality governance23 offer actionable models to mitigate the net impacts of new developments, complementing broader approaches such as integrated urban water management (IUWM).24 These shifts reflect a growing move from reactive management towards proactive, systems-based innovation.While many of the more established frameworks provide valuable insights into resilience planning, infrastructure performance, digital monitoring or scenario modelling, they tend to focus on individual components of the water system in isolation. As a result, they rarely address the structural enablers needed to move from diagnosis to delivery. In many cases, cities – including city authorities and utilities – understand what needs to be done but remain unclear on how to align actors, unlock financing and implement solutions systemically. Table 1 summarizes a sample of these established tools, which span a range of use cases, from urban sustainability benchmarking and scenario planning to resilience assessment and nature-based solution design. Yet most remain limited in geographic application, institutional scope or system integration. This underscores the persistent need for methodologies that not only assess water systems performance but also highlight the systemic enablers – regulatory, financial, institutional – that are necessary to activate and scale innovation in diverse urban contexts.1.2 Limitations of existing frameworks Image credit: Kay Bailey Hutchison (KBH) Desalination Plant, El Paso Water Water-BOOST: Enabling Innovation for Future-Ready Cities 9