Water Infrastructure Asset Management Primer (PDF)

Water infrastructure systems are essential for sustaining societal quality of life. However, they face a variety of challenges and potential threats to sustained performance, including ageing, deterioration, underfunding, disruptive events, and population growth, among others. Infrastructure Asset Management can contribute significantly to address those challenges and sustain system performance in the long term. Current infrastructure asset management frameworks focus mostly on performance management, and although sustainability and resiliency management are considered at some degree, it is necessary to advance the understanding and integration of more practical and comprehensive sustainability and resiliency enhancing methods and tools into the asset management practice mainstream. Infrastructure sustainability and resilience are still predominantly academic topics, but there are enough practical advances to start integrating and relating them with current asset management mainstream discourse. Furthermore, the integration of infrastructure sustainability and resilience methodologies with asset management is convenient given the increase in risks to infrastructure performance worldwide. This Primer presents an integrated understanding of Water Infrastructure Management in terms of Performance Management, Sustainability Management, and Resiliency Management. The document also presents a discussion on the state-of-the-literature and the state-of-the-practice on these three infrastructure management topics as observed by the WATERiD research team while developing the national knowledge database. Finally, this Primer compares both the theoretical and practical domains in order to identify gaps and formulate recommendations for improving holistic water infrastructure asset management and also advancing integrated performance, sustainability, and resiliency management theory and practices in the water sector.