Urban stormwater runoff is a leading cause of water quality degradation in 50% of receiving water bodies worldwide. Urbanization causes increased frequency and volume of urban runoff, causing also important floods in urban areas. This is why the City of Ramat Gan decided to become a "Water Sensitive City", thus to deploy several actions that will include the implementation of innovative, resource-efficient, natural-based solutions, backed with education and soft measures. The European Commission will support this innovative strategy.
Water is being discharged in a form of urban runoff out of most of the world's cities as a nuisance. Urban runoff or stormwater holds a wide spectrum of pollutants that contaminate downstream water bodies. In addition, accelerated climate change has challenged our cities and their infrastructure which if mismanaged will lead to the risk of life situations as well as damaging public and private property due to flooding and erosion.
This is a problem which is well known in Ramat Gan, a 150.000 people city closed between the City of Tel Aviv and the West Bank, particularly in an area in its borders famous fot its National Park and Safari. Floods with polluted water are common, mainly in the period of rains.
This is why the municipality started to work with various experts around the concept of the "Water Sensitive Cities", an action that will promote Ramat-Gan’s transition towards a climate-resilient city by implementing a Water-Sensitive-City approach.
This pioneering initiative will demonstrate to national and other local authorities’ a successful climate action at local level and will improve their capacity to design, implement and finance innovative frameworks and partnerships to solve water shortage challenges and prepare for climate changes.
This project, worth not far from 11 millions of euros, will be co-funded up to 3,5 millions of euros by the European Commission in the framework of the programme "Climate for Cities (C4C) in the Southern Neighbourhood".
What is a Water Sensitive City?
A water sensitive city adopts and integrates decentralized and centralized water management solutions. Urban water is managed in a way that will ensure water security, reduce flood risk, protect aquifers and urban streams, improve the urban climate and landscape, and reduce the carbon footprint of the city. A water sensitive city is based on three main principles:
A City that is a Water Supply Catchment – A water sensitive city views stormwater as a water resource, and not as a nuisance that must be removed from the city. The city is seen as a water supply catchment that has the potential to offer a variety of water sources.
A City that Provides Ecosystem Services – A water sensitive city is one whose built environment functions to supplement and support the natural environment. The city works to protect the health of its ecosystem (including public parks, urban streams, beaches, and the sea). It converts open public space into parks and green areas, and creates vegetated traffic islands, etc. These areas function as the city’s “green lungs” and can be used to harvest, purify and store stormwater, thereby preventing the pollution of downstream water bodies while increasing biodiversity.
A City with Community Involvement – In a water sensitive city, the residents participate in decision making that enables sustainability in their city. There is communal awareness and involvement due to the residents’ desire to improve their quality of life. Citizens have the knowledge and the will to make good water-related decisions – by acting to conserve water, to protect water quality and prevent pollution of water bodies.
The Challenge in Ramat
Polluted runoff flows in Wadi Kofer and, in the wet season, causes severe floods in nearby neighborhoods, the National Park and Safari in Ramat-Gan. Its administration invests many resources in drainage infrastructure that transports polluted runoff water to the Yarkon River and from there to the Mediterranean Sea. Then, in order to provide water to the city, the State of Israel invests a lot of resources in order to pump water from the Mediterranean Sea to desalination facilities and from there, transports desalinated water to the city. This cycle of excessive infrastructure and energy causes downstream water bodies contamination, leads to ecological damage, burdens on infrastructure and many costs to the state and the city.
The implementation activities that will be carried out during the WSC project will "break" this inefficient and non-ecological cycle, by harvesting the polluted runoff water, purifying upstream, and recharge the purified water into the Ramat Gan local aquifer. This implementation will result in securing and inreaching Ramat-Gan’s water sources in the local aquifer, leading to improvement of urban resilience and citizen’s quality of life improvements.
The technical solution in Ramat
The Kofer stream, about 5 km long, flows along the area of the National Park in Ramat Gan and the Safari next to it. Since in Wadi Kofer two million cubic meters of runoff water and stormwater flow annually, it holds the potential of becoming a source of water to purify and then refill the local aquifer with high quality water.
This amount of water is more than enough to achieve a net-zero water consumption at the National Park and the Safari, which consume a huge amount of water for irrigation purposes and for refilling the National Park Lake.
The Water Sensitive City nature-based solutions will be implemented in order to mitigate floods caused by polluted runoff water, retain and purify polluted runoff water in the area and recharge it to refill the local aquifer within the rain season as for storage, and pump the water back from the aquifer, when needed.
In order to retain, purify and recharge the local aquifer with a minimum amount of 500.000 cubes of polluted runoff and stormwater, five biofilters will be located in the area.
For the recharge of the local aquifer with purified water, 25 recharging wells will be drilled along the area. For the benefit of pumping water from the aquifer, the project will use pums, utilizing energy from solar panels and three already existing pumping wells.
In the dry season, part of the purified water will be used for irrigation purposes as well as to refill the National Park Lake.
Soft Measures to support the project in Ramat
This infrastructure would not be adopted alone, they would be coupled with a number of soft measures to make the infrastructure part of a larger plan including educational, health and economic strands to improve its sustainability in the long term. This project will leverage its NBS* as an educational platform, teaching and training professionals, practitioners, Ramat-Gan’s municipality employees and open public.
The COL team will orchestrate scientific work on Data collected - both analysis and sharing, knowledge sharing and collaborative co-creation processes between the different stakeholders - private companies, research institutions, governmental, public sector and citizens. Ramat Gan municipality has already shared it’s WSC project planning with the Minister of Energy, and the Water Authority to kick-off the knowledge sharing process.
The Team
The City of Ramat Gan will not work by itself, but it will be supported by some local partners, namely Shenkar, the university of Bar Ilan, Adam Teva D'Vin, which will support the whole process from a design, legal and communication point of view.
The Planning
This ambitious project just started and it will be achieved by the end of 2024.
More information
Water Sensitive Cities in Israel: https://wsc.org.il/En/research/creating-water-sensitive-cities-in-israel/
City of Ramat Gan: https://www.ramat-gan.muni.il/
*NBS=Natural Base Solutions
Credits: this article is written in collaboration with the Water Sensitive Cities in Israel (the founder and managing partner Yaron Zinger) and the City of Ramat Gan (the Innovation Manager Mor Harir)
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