Looking for efficiency through integrated water management between agriculture and urban uses

Many urban water systems must cope with water scarcity and climate change and additionally they must be able to fulfil the objectives of environmental protection, efficiency and sustainability. At the end they must provide the expected level of service now and in the future horizons. Some new comprehensive approaches are assessing the total water footprint in a territory using the concept of virtual water and incorporating interactions between agriculture, urban and industrial uses. Besides this broader method of analysis it is important to go further and make analysis of opportunities for efficiency based on a new paradigm of integrated use of water. Investing in improvement of efficiency not only in urban distribution systems, studying the possibilities of permanent or temporal reallocation of water rights from agriculture to urban. Establishing agreements for interchange of raw water for urban regenerated water. Signing options contracts for water trading under drought conditions. Risk of shortage is the factor to complete the framework and it is a key component to review and to manage