L17. Water sensitive urban design – current issues, modelling strategies and challenges

The rapid urbanisation has placed pressures on the natural environment through the extraction of freshwater resources, pollution of waterways from urban runoff, the discharge of treated wastewater to receiving waters, and disturbance of natural hydrological regimes. This had led to urban developments being planned with Integrated Urban Water Management (IUWM) and Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) approaches, which are becoming increasingly common across metropolitan cities in Australia. WSUD is a catch-all term for environmentally sustainable water resource management, which can help in achieving sustainability objectives by minimising the impacts of urban development to ecological and hydrological processes and also relieve stress on conventional water systems.

Since WSUD developments remain novel in comparison to conventional approaches, this session focuses on the following:

  1. Knowledge of the systems in regards to their planning and design
  2. Current modelling practices for implementing and assessing WSUD strategies
  3. Benefits of WSUD strategies in terms of environmental and health impacts
  4. Challenges faced in the uptake of these approaches.