A holistic approach towards high quality urban water through effective monitoring and urban water management planning

Urban water is confronted by global challenges such as climate change and emerging anthropogenic substances. As such, protecting urban water quality requires a proactive approach that increases the urban water system resilience and their surrounding ecosystems. Thus motivated, the overall objective of QleanUP is to deliver a water quality management platform that will incorporate: 1) Stakeholder engagement; 2) sensors and techniques to monitor levels of existing and emerging pollutants, 3) digital tools to estimate difficult to measure pollutants and understand and predict the spread of pollution, 4) risk-based urban water quality management plans and holistic water quality monitoring. The objective will be reached by demonstrating a compendium of modular, complementary innovative solutions, including novel real-time (soft-) sensing and water quality measurements, easy to deploy decision tools that support resilient, evidence-based operational awareness of urban water systems and risk-based interventions. In line with the EU zero pollution action plan, QleanUP aspires to increase the resilience of urban water systems in terms of both increased robustness (against short term stresses) and adaptability (against longer term uncertainties) and ensure high-quality urban water, minimising nutrients, heavy metals, (pathogenic) micro-organisms, including anti-microbial resistance (AMR), organic micropollutants (OMPs), including PFAS, and microplastics. To test and validate the efficacy of the urban water management platform, the developed tools and strategies will be demonstrated across five (5) Demo Cases in Switzerland, Spain, Greece, the Netherlands, and the UK, supported by co-creation activities and stakeholder engagement.