Sustainable urban water management index for developing countries. A case study in Puebla City, Mexico

Abstract

Several indicator and index frameworks have been reported to assess management efficiency and promote transparency, facilitating decision-making and innovation. However, they cannot be applied in cities with limited information, making them impractical. This study proposes a Sustainable Urban Water Management Index (SUWMI) for such cities, selecting six AquaRating indicators plus two indexes recommended in the Sustainable Development Goal 6, yielding a simplified and practical version for diagnosing the management performance rate of the Water Operating Systems (WOS) in cities. Conceptual and mathematical models were defined for SUWMI, and the eight selected terms were hierarchized based on a decision tree with the participation of an expert panel and further multicriteria decision-making methodology by the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to calculate the weighting parameters. The selected indicators represent five categories on a percentage scale. The highly populated Puebla City Metropolitan Zone in Mexico was the case study. Information was gathered from five Water Operation Systems (WOS) from 2002 to 2020. The tap water area's coverage and physical efficiency improved despite the population growth due to an adequate political strategy after 2014. The SUWMI values of each WOS diagnoses its performance, highlighting their differences and providing a valuable tool for guiding urban water public policy programs. The paper proposes a simple, fast, and easy-to-calculate index that can be helpful for a broader cluster of cities and urban settlements with deficient available information, which is common in developing countries.