Forecasting water demand for urban greening

About This Project

Sydney Water is seeking to understand future water demand for urban greening and maintenance of the valuable open space across Sydney Metropolitan Region. The work is aligned with future scenarios, which define plausible futures that allow decision-makers to think through possibilities that might otherwise be overlooked.

To enable scenario-based planning across such a large area, we used advanced geo-processing to provide Sydney Water with an automated and flexible modelling approach that generates spatial grids of water demand, based on population projections, climate grids, climate change scenarios, and assumptions about greening quality and extent, which vary depending on social and economic factors and the scenarios that were developed.

The tool, developed as a standalone python script, enabled analysts at Sydney Water to perform very large numbers of simulations to explore scenarios without having to rely on ongoing technical support.

Our approach can be extended to better understand how water demand and irrigation can support the development and implementation of the Sydney Green Grid and other regional and local open space strategies.