The Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand, and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, with support from the Global Water and Climate Adaptation Centre - Aachen, Bangkok, Chennai, Dresden (ABCD-Centre) successfully organized a training workshop on “Measuring Urban Water Security using the Water Security Assessment Tool (WATSAT)” to the first cohort of Joint Master's Program in Water Security and Global Change students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, India on 10 December 2024. The workshop's objective was to promote the capacity building of future water professionals by introducing the WATSAT and making them able to independently assess the water security status at the city scale.

More than 20+ students attended the training workshop. Delivering the opening remarks, Prof. S.A. Sannasiraj from IIT Madras, emphasized the critical significance of the water security concept and underscored the workshop's timely relevance for the students of IIT Madras.

Prof. Mukand Babel from the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand, set the scene by introducing the concept of water security and provided an in-depth description of WATSAT and details of the assessment framework. It was followed by Dr. Dibesh Khadka from AIT, engaging the participants with a hands-on exercise using the tool with a case study. After the hands-on exercise, discussion on the utility of WATSAT and issues around water security in India was carried out by Prof. Babel. Participant's reflection on the workshop was heard and Prof. Babel provided the closing remarks and distributed certificates to the participants.

The water security assessment tool (WATSAT) is an example of best practice implemented to bridge the science-policy-society gap by facilitating the transfer of science into practice. WATSAT is a tool developed at the Asian Institute of Technology to help city authorities and decision-makers objectively evaluate the water security situation in the city. The tool is available at (www.watsat.org) and uses an indicator-based methodology that measures five distinct dimensions of water security, culminating in a Water Security Index (WSI).