Water Convention 2024 Call for Papers

Message from the Co-chairs of the SIWW2024 Water Convention Programme Committee

Singapore International Water Week 2024 returns next year from 18-22 June 2024 at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre in Singapore. As one of the leading global water events in the world focused on urban water innovation and solutions, SIWW2024 will once again host global leaders, experts and practitioners from water utilities, agencies, governments, cities, industry and academia to share and co-create innovative solutions to solve the world’s urban water challenges.

As one of the key flagship events of SIWW, the Water Convention provides the platform for the sharing of innovations, advanced technologies, and best practices among researchers, practitioners, and technology providers in the water industry. In the 2022 edition, the Water Convention attracted more than 1,200 delegates from 52 countries and featured over 300 oral and poster presentations across 6 Hot Issues Workshops and 47 technical sessions.

Co-organised by PUB, Singapore’s national water agency, and the International Water Association, the 2024 Water Convention invites experts and practitioners to share their newest and latest innovation, technologies, best practices and case studies in six themes covering the urban water cycle. These themes reflect the urgent issues and challenges facing urban water practitioners, such as ensuring the sustainable production and supply of safe and clean drinking water, the effective and efficient collection and treatment of used water, resiliency and adaptability of urban cities to climate change, floods and sea-level rise, and resource efficiency and circular economy for the water sector.

It is our wish for the papers presented at this Water Convention to inspire and foster collaborations amongst various stakeholders within the global water community, and contribute to meaningful action to build a sustainable global water future for all. On this note, we invite you to submit your abstracts and share your valuable ideas and experiences with peers from around the world.

We look forward to meeting you in Singapore at the SIWW2024 Water Convention.

Programme Committee

Theme 1: Delivering Water from Source to Tap (Network)

Theme Leader

Programme Committee Members

Theme 2: Delivering Water from Source to Tap (Treatment)

Theme Leader

Programme Committee Members

Theme 3: Effective and Efficient Wastewater Management

a. Treatment

b. Conveyance

Theme Leader

Programme Committee Members

Theme 4: Cities of the Future and Coastal & Flood Resilience

Theme Leader

Programme Committee Members

Theme 5: Water Quality and One Health

Theme Leader

Programme Committee Members

Theme 6: Nexus and Circularity

Theme Leader

Programme Committee Members

Themes and Topics

Digital transformation has empowered water utilities to leverage advanced technologies and data gathered from multiple sensors to improve their network planning and design. This enables water utilities to achieve an efficient and resilient network. The wealth of network information supports operators in proactive maintenance of their assets, leak detection, condition assessment, valve operations and mains flushing. This informed approach ensures smooth and uninterrupted water supply. The proliferation of digital twins and smart water meters also betters our understanding of the network’s behaviour and enables more effective water conservation strategies. However, it is important to note that digital transformation should prioritise people, and digital solutions should be relevant to and embraced by both operators and customers. This theme welcomes abstracts on the latest innovations, technologies, best practices, and case studies on water supply network management. Topics of interest include:

Cities worldwide face the challenge of limited freshwater supply, prompting them to diversify their water sources to become more resilient. As treatment technologies continue to advance, there is an increasing focus on making the process more sustainable by reducing energy requirements, exploring beneficial reuse of brine, and harvesting energy from waste streams. Additionally, these technologies have to be adaptable to the future impacts of climate change, for instance by designing treatment processes that can cope with changing water quality. While ensuring a sufficient and sustainable water supply is critical, it is equally important to ensure that the water supplied is of the highest possible quality. To this end, water utilities are applying advanced technologies that can effectively treat and remove contaminants of emerging concern and specific groups of contaminants that are resistant to conventional processes. Water utilities are also exploring the use of innovative sensors and digital solutions to support them in plant operations, maintenance, and optimisation. This theme welcomes abstracts on innovative and smart water treatment technologies and solutions in the following areas:

In our pursuit of a sustainable future, the perception of wastewater has changed from being something unwanted to a beneficial resource. This shift drives the desire to extract as much water, energy, and valuable materials from wastewater as possible. A growing number of technologies have been developed to enhance energy generation during wastewater treatment. Meanwhile, to mitigate climate change, attempts are made to reduce the overall carbon footprint of wastewater management including nitrous oxide and methane emissions. There is an upward trend in recovering and reusing material resources from waste streams. For the remaining wastewater effluent, a high quality is targeted for reuse applications, potentially in part through the use of membrane technologies and processes. Besides looking into new innovations, efforts are also placed in improving the efficiencies of existing processes to enhance sustainability. This theme welcomes abstracts examining best practices and innovative technologies for sustainable and economically viable centralised or decentralised treatment and management of wastewater and the resources embedded therein.

Sewers are vital for the sanitary conveyance of wastewater to treatment facilities. To ensure that sewers can carry out their function well, proper operation and maintenance are necessary. Utilities are taking a more proactive approach in these areas with the help of digitalisation and intelligent technologies. In sewer operation, analytics and management tools are employed with real-time sensors and meters for detecting and predicting blockages, inflows, and infiltrations. It is equally important to examine the quality of the wastewater discharged into sewers as it affects downstream treatment processes. In maintenance, advanced inspection equipment is deployed for sewer inspection, cleaning, and rehabilitation. The necessity for cutting-edge technologies becomes more apparent as large sewers are laid more deeply in the increasingly urbanised cities. Such deep tunnel sewage systems require innovative solutions for monitoring the tunnel’s structural integrity and conveyance condition. Abstracts looking into novel technologies, best practices and applied research for wastewater networks in the areas below are welcomed.

Cities and towns are the economic powerhouses. They account for more than 70% of global gross domestic product (GDP). And by 2050, they are expected to accommodate 70% of the world’s population. Cities are complex adaptive systems, with multiple interconnected elements converging, concentrating, and exacerbating many of climate change impacts. Over the last decade, SIWW has provided a platform for fostering integrated urban water management across the social-technical domain.

The Cities of the Future Theme of SIWW2024 will focus on coastal cities and small island states. While all cities globally are faced with climate change water-related challenges of water scarcity, floods, environmental pollution, and loss of natural capital, to varying degrees, coastal cities are particularly vulnerable to climate change impact on flooding from multiple fronts, i.e. sea-level rise and storm surges, fluvial floods with many coastal cities located within large river basins, and pluvial floods owing to many coastal cities being located on relatively low-lying and flat terrain. Many small island states are also reliant on vulnerable groundwater resources as their primary source of potable water. Coastal pollution (e.g., plastics and more generally waste management – solid or liquid) is also becoming a critical challenge for coastal cities to ensure local water quality as an asset for liveability and citizens engagement on water-related issues, but also to contribute to a wider range of SDGs.

Our focus on coastal cities and small island states is therefore within the context of climate change resilience and adaptive capacity and managing coastal pollution. Emphasis is placed on innovative coastal and flood resilience measures which need to be multifunctional (due to land scarcity in small island states) and flexible (to manage the uncertainty in storm surges and sea level rises). Authors are invited to submit abstracts across the following four technical and water governance sub-topics for coastal cities and small island states.

Global climate change has led to an increased focus on water quality and its impact on human, animal, and ecosystem health. Recent progress in the application of genomics has opened up new possibilities for water quality surveillance and management. Wastewater-based epidemiological surveillance (WES) has attracted attention worldwide during the pandemic as a real-time monitoring method for SARS-CoV-2; it has great potential to be applied to monitoring the emergence of new virus variants, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and pathogens at large, as well as medicine and drug use in communities. Innovative sensors for detecting pollutants and contaminants in drinking water are becoming more sensitive and specific which raises concerns if hazardous concentration standards are driven by the ever-increasing resolution of detection techniques (shifting from parts per trillion to parts per quadrillion) rather than based on proven health risks. The current debate on PFAS highlights the growing divergence between standards across the world. Water quality is also increasingly crucial in the context of medical care; the quality of recreational waters is another issue of concern. Effective communication between sectors and to communities is crucial for the successful promotion of One-Water/One-Health but remains a challenge. This is a Call for Papers directed at policy- and decision-makers, planners, practitioners, and researchers dealing with one or more of the sub-topics listed below:

The water sector has made significant progress in adopting circular economy principles, particularly in the area of closing the water loop through the application of advanced treatment processes. There is now a growing emphasis on closing the resource and carbon loops within and beyond water systems. To achieve this goal, it is essential to adopt a system thinking approach that takes into account not only technological aspects, but also policy and planning, stakeholder engagement, application, marketability, and potential financing solutions. It is also important to adopt a nexus approach that enables systems integration and collaboration with other sectors to fully leverage the benefits of circular solutions. Against this backdrop, this theme welcomes abstracts on sustainable frameworks, strategies, and case studies on next-generation solutions for the water sector to support a circular economy.

Abstract Submission Procedures

Co-organisers