According to some estimates, in the first two decades of the 21st century, 79 global big cities have suffered extensively from a drought disaster. Meanwhile, climate change has magnified urban droughts in both frequency and severity, putting tremendous pressure on our cities’ water supply.

This year Spain was in the headlines due to the record breaking heat waves, the lack of rainfall, the trucked-in water and disappearing lakes. It’s enough to make you wonder. Instead of ringing the bells of doom and saying that all is lost, we need to understand the scale of this problem, its source and what we - people - can actually do about it.

It seems that the right thing to say is not that we are running out of water but that water access is becoming unpredictable. Sometimes it's not enough and other times it’s so much it’s destructive. Therefore, environmental, climate-change related reasons aside there is another major issue that we need to understand.

The way we travel and the way we grow and design our cities with impermeable surfaces is permanently altering the cycle of water. As a result we are not able to close the circularity of water, in other words we are not able to recycle it and we are polluting it. It’s not that we don’t have enough water coming from the sky, it’s mainly that we don’t invest in the right infrastructure to clean and recycle the water we have access to.

What we need is a strategy. For this reason, Alejandro Guerrero Neira and Jayashree Chandrappa will share with us the ways we can incorporate resilient strategies and innovative systems to face this increasingly challenging access to the most important resource there is. Water.