The Contribution of Geographical Information Systems—GIS in Water and Sewage Companies for Water Sustainability

Abstract

Across the globe, close to 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water and 4.2 billion people lack safely managed sanitation. As such, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 6—“To guarantee accessible and sustainable water and sanitation systems for all”—is not only an urgent task, but one that requires the development and widespread use of new technologies that might allow for providing infrastructure and services to more inhabitants at lower costs. Water is a threatened natural resource and its management is a great challenge for land planning in metropolitan areas, which contain many inhabitants in small territories, often with limited resources. Geospatial data and technologies started to be used mainly in the 1990s by water and sewage companies to support service management in urban areas. In this chapter, we present the evolution of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and describe their uses by water and sewage companies from five metropolitan areas: Sao Paulo (Brazil), Fortaleza (Brazil), Rome (Italy), Budapest (Hungary) and Nairobi (Kenya). GIS are applied in these cities for water and sanitation management, facing very different technological and urban challenges and their evolution has been proving beneficial for sustainability. GIS are applied for leakage control in pipelines, to preserve environmentally relevant areas for water supply near dams and wells and to provide information for many stakeholders.