WATSAT training workshop in IIT Madras, India
Water Security Assessment Tool (WATSAT)
Successful conduction of the training workshop on Water Security Assessment Tool (WATSAT)
The Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand, and the National Institute of Urban Affairs (NIUA), India with support from the Global Water and Climate Adaptation Centre – Aachen, Bangkok, Chennai, Dresden (ABCD-Centre) successfully organized a pre-conference workshop on “How to Measure Urban Water Security? An introduction to the Water Security Assessment Tool (WATSAT)” at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, India on 03 October 2023. The workshop was part of the international conference on “Water Security and Climate Adaptation (WSCA2023),” held in IIT Madras on 04-07 October 2023. 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 30+ participants attended the training workshop, including students, early-career researchers, practitioners, and government agencies. In his welcome remarks, Prof. Jurgen Stamm from Dresden Technical University (TUD) and the ABCD-Centre lead introduced the Centre itself and the activities it has been conducting in the last three years. Prof. Stamm highlighted the paramount importance of water security in the urban area in various dimensions such as population growth, public health, economy, infrastructure, social equity, environment, etc. On behalf of the organizing team, Dr. Victor Shinde from NIUA provided the opening remarks to the participants and reiterated the tool's usefulness to city planners for assessing and improving the water security status of their cities.
Prof. Mukand Babel from the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand, set the scene by introducing the concept of water security. Dr. Shinde 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. Prof. S. A. Sannasiraj from IIT Madras and a member of the WSCA2023 organizing committee 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)
Overall, the workshop seires successfully provided a platform for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and exploring innovative solutions for water security and adaptation challenges .
