2025 China Fellowship
Four Dimensions of Water Security: Availability, Accessibility, Resilience, and Sustainability

Behind the simple phrase “water security” lies opportunities, challenges, and goals that are multidimensional, interdisciplinary, and not limited by geography or borders. In the UN global indicators for SDG 6, many keywords for goals related to the topic of water can be found, such as transboundary water cooperation, water-related ecosystems, community participation, sanitation, and more. These goals are very diverse and designed for different scales and actors, so I propose four dimensions of water security from the perspective of the landscape architecture discipline, combined with UN documents and data.

The concept of water security can be broken down into availability, accessibility, and sustainability according to UN-Water, and resilience can be further refined according to UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) documents on water-related disasters. This proposal will analyze how we should move towards a water-secure future from these four perspectives.

East and Southeast Asia is a region of rich geography, with large economic and climatic differences between countries, and most of these countries face certain water-related challenges or have their own unique water utilization strategies. Meanwhile, Australia, which is not far from Southeast Asia, has a very good track record in terms of drinking water resources, sanitation and hygiene, and water reclamation. Therefore, these two regions, which are closely associated and distinctive, will be the study area for this proposal.

Availability

The issue behind the dimension of water availability is the worldwide lack of freshwater resources. Each of the countries within the scope of this study exhibits varying degrees of this problem, with the most prominent being Singapore’s scarcity of freshwater resources stemming from its limited land area and high population density. As a solution, 83% of the renewable water resources in Singapore are being withdrawn, after taking into account environmental flow requirements. [1] Singapore’s water stress is consistently high compared to other East and Southeast Asian countries. [2]

In other cities that lack fresh water, the initial response program is usually to extract groundwater, however, over-exploitation of groundwater causes serious environmental problems, such as subsidence of the urban ground, and a significant increase in the salinity of the well water due to seawater back-up.

Accessibility

The indicator of accessibility reveals that certain social groups do not have access to the water resources they need under critical social and geographical conditions. This phenomenon is prominent in Indonesia, where only about one third of the people have access to safely managed water services, and the situation is worse in rural areas. For example, in the Tambak Wedi community in the urban slums of Surabaya, 40% of households rely on private water tankers, which cost eight times more per unit than the municipal network, and in the Bantul district of rural Yogyakarta, where females walk an average of six kilometers a day to fetch water, which has led to an increase in the dropout rate of girls from school by 23%.

Resilience

Human society has always been challenged by the natural environment; some disasters come from the behavior of humans themselves, while others are rooted in a particular piece of land. Behind the topic of resilience lies the reflection and response of the human society after suffering from water related disasters. For example, the 1997–2009 “Millennium Drought” in Australia led to a 40–60% drop in the flow of the Murray River and agricultural losses of over $5 billion. [3] [4] Consequently, the Water Act 2007 separated water rights from land ownership and allowed water rights to be traded as a stand-alone asset. This has greatly increased both the productivity of agricultural water use and the economic resilience of farmers.

In addition to improving resilience from a policy development perspective, infrastructure in some flood-prone areas can be one of the best ways to keep cities safe from flooding. For example, the metropolitan area’s Gaikoku Drainage Road, which is known as Tokyo’s “underground temple of disaster prevention,” is one such engineering masterpiece.

Sustainability

Sustainability plays a very important role in water security, because this dimension requires us not only to propose solutions to the problems of the present, but also to look to the future and to create a water-secure future that can function in the long term and can be self-conditioned. Today, as modernization continues, industrial pollution and coastal development threaten the health of water ecosystems in many coastal cities. For example, in Japan, the Osaka Prefectural Government has built a series of ecological infrastructures along Osaka Bay to alleviate the serious eutrophication of the water body due to industrial effluents and land reclamation.

In addition, sustainability requires that society be able to prevent problems before they occur. In the case of Jakarta, Indonesia, where over-exploitation of groundwater has made the city unsustainable, the Indonesian government has decided to relocate the capital to Nusantara, which in turn will lead to the deforestation of 256 square kilometers of rainforest, threatening orangutan habitat. [5]

Conclusion

Water is an important part of nature, an indispensable substance for human life, and an important factor that cannot be ignored in the built environment. A water-secure future is essential for human society, and to achieve it, at least the four dimensions mentioned above must be met, which, as can be seen from the cases cited in this study, are interlinked and also closely related to other disciplines.

The next stage of this proposal will be to analyze and compare the sites mentioned above and other sites that fit into the research framework based on these four dimensions, and to sum up with a water security evaluation system and a toolbox of strategies that can be applied to most regions. In this process, I will apply the analysis methods of digital landscapes and combine them with my subsequent studies in this field to complete a complete and rigorous theoretical system. This system and toolbox will benefit architects, landscape architects, planners, and other policy makers, as there will be cases at different scales and aspects in the process of selecting research locations.

Notes

[1] Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015).

[2] “Eastern and South-Eastern Asia,” UN Water, accessed March 20, 2025.

[3] Brian Richter, “The Australian Approach to Water Crisis: Work With Farmers,” Sustainable Waters, June 4, 2014.

[4] Sean Coleman, “The Millennium Drought,” ArcGIS StoryMaps, May 18, 2023.

[5] Baston Gokkon, “As Indonesia’s new capital takes shape, risks to wider Borneo come into focus,” Mongabay, March 8, 2023.

The SOM Foundation’s 2025 China Fellowship represents far more than a travel opportunity to me—it is an invitation letter bridging continents, theories, and practices. As a landscape architect confronting climate challenges, this grant will enable me to systematically document how different cultures mediate between built environments and ecological pressures during my travels, while learning from outstanding sustainable landscape design methodologies. This independent research period between completing my undergraduate studies and beginning graduate school will serve as a pivotal milestone for both my professional growth and personal breakthrough. As someone who has been inspired by the SOM Foundation’s research projects for a long time, I am profoundly honored to join this distinguished academic community as a practitioner. This research will not only refine my professional competencies but also provide a valuable opportunity to contribute a Chinese landscape architect's perspective to the international academic community. I am committed to honoring this trust with rigorous fieldwork and substantive research outcomes.
Zhang Nan

Australia, Indonesia, Japan, and Singapore