Future of water servicesShaping smarter, more sustainable water planning, together

Planning in the spotlight

For many water businesses, ‘planning’ ways of working have developed over many years. They are characterised by linear, lengthy, asset-focused processes, a reliance on disparate data sources and manual decision-making frameworks, and an increasing complexity in planning outputs. These complicated processes are struggling to keep up with heightened demands, including climate adaptation, water reuse, integrated water management, and circular economy principles.

At the same time, the sector needs to prioritise enabling urban growth and affordable housing availability. Stakeholders increasingly expect rapid responses in assessing servicing feasibility for development opportunities and priorities. Yet most current processes have not been designed to readily accommodate rapid testing of alternatives and near-real-time responses to external parties.

Cost of living pressures are coinciding with unprecedented, plans for infrastructure investment in the water sector. As governments, regulators and water businesses engage to shape the most prudent choices for various trade-offs and funding options – across enablement of economic and housing growth, assurance of resilient services, customer bills and debt – utility planning is in the spotlight for trust and transparency and across investment priorities, delivery confidence and the ability to adapt to changing needs. Water business planning has always faced scrutiny, but the increased focus is an added catalyst for change.

To navigate this complexity, water businesses have to elevate the priority of modernising their planning systems.

"Extending a system-wide perspective in planning is essential to building long-term resilience and ensuring prudent investment pathways for future generations."

What we've heard from our water leaders

Breaking down the barriers to better planning

While modernising water planning is essential, outdated planning systems, accumulated complexity, and mounting service demands make transformation challenging. In conversations with water leaders, key barriers identified include:

Below, we explore pathways forward to overcoming these barriers, critical to building a planning system that is more productive, more adaptable, and gets the best from the planning team.

Utilities need to scale system and asset performance insights, using condition and risk data to understand and forecast system dynamics, and performance, together with assessing alternative responses that strengthen overall resilience. Many water businesses attest to 1) making great progress in specific examples of asset analytics, and 2) finding it difficult to scale the processes and insights to achieve a step change in decision making.

Currently, fragmented planning tools make it difficult to model interconnected water and wastewater systems, natural system interactions, or emissions outcomes – limiting the ability to plan holistically without substantial effort. The growing focus on circularity, environmental performance, and adaptive triggers is exposing the limitations of sequential, siloed planning approaches, which inhibit responsiveness and adds pressure on teams to answer questions quickly using ways of working that were not designed for such speed.

"We need a more systematic approach to monitoring our systems and planning sensitivities under different scenarios, so we can better assess trade-offs and long-term impacts."

What we've heard from our water leaders

Equally important is maintaining visibility of the long-term economics of service system design. This context is vital for ensuring today’s infrastructure investments are aligned with future resilience, affordability, and emerging service directions – including the potential role of purified recycled water and the renewal of ageing infrastructure. Evaluating trade-offs across alternative system scenarios, underpinned by an understanding of the impact on the long-run marginal cost of delivering the service, will be critical for making prudent decisions that serve both current and future generations.

The urgent need to modernise the digital tools and frameworks that enable better support for planners requires a clear vision for the future, providing the basis to identify the intentional investments in foundational systems – together these will be the path forward.

Embracing adaptive planning for a changing future

The ability to adapt to emerging challenges – climate variability, regulatory changes, population growth, etc. – is central to a future-ready water sector. However, many planning 'systems' can still tend to work to the rhythm of regulatory proposal cycles rather than respond to trends or signals that may benefit from more dynamic adaptation.

Establishing a consistent view of how current and forecast system performance compares to planning assumptions enables more confident sensitivity analysis, scenario modelling and decision-making. This will aid in closing the loop on adaptive plans and investment strategies. Only by continually monitoring trends and triggers relating to adaptive pathways can utilities have confidence that they can adjust on a timely basis, as conditions change to strengthen resilience in an unpredictable environment.

"While we've made progress in developing adaptive pathways for infrastructure investment, few of us have established systematic monitoring to trigger timely, data-driven decisions."

What we've heard from our water leaders

Water utility planning is always dealing with balancing competing priorities, from water cycle management and sustainability targets to emissions reductions, growth and future service system strategies, customer preferences and bill impact considerations. Yet, many legacy planning approaches are not integrated in a way that facilitate a more productive and consistent assessment of trade-offs and decisions, and the scenarios water businesses increasingly need to consider.

By systematically developing and integrating digital planning foundations for key decisions utilities can transition from fragmented tools towards more consolidated, data-driven platforms that streamline scenario modelling, investment planning, and system performance assessment. This shift also enhances transparency and responsiveness, addressing the growing expectations of stakeholders.

Digital tools such as GIS mapping, system modelling, scenario modelling (increasingly assisted through AI), and real-time analytics can aid focus, prioritisation and efficiency, allowing planners to test multiple service scenarios, optimise investment decisions, communicate trade-offs effectively, and concentrate their time on the highest priorities.

Additionally, expanding modelling capabilities beyond built infrastructure – to include waterway health, biodiversity, and environmental interdependencies – will strengthen long-term sustainability and investment decisions. These capabilities will be important to underpin circular systems and integrated water cycle management objectives.

Investing in the digital underpinnings for future planning will not only contribute to the productivity and satisfaction of planning teams, it will also provide opportunities to more effectively and intuitively represent plans to stakeholders. Visualisation of scenarios which relate to the drivers of adaptive plans can powerfully help tell the story of how the systems that service our communities need to respond over time to continue to meet the needs of customers and future generations.

"Using planning insights to engage stakeholders is more important than ever, reinforcing the need to make our planning processes more transparent and responsive."

What we've heard from our water leaders

Strengthening collaboration to shape the future of water planning

Many of the sector’s greatest challenges – climate adaptation, regulatory shifts, and infrastructure sustainability – are shared challenges for most water businesses. They create a real context for collaboration in ideating future states, shared solutions, cross-industry knowledge exchange, and a commitment to collective problem-solving. Utilities that work together – sharing knowledge, data, and resources – can avoid redundant or competing effort, accelerate innovation, and optimise infrastructure investments.

An important part of collaboration is ensuring that investment trade-offs, planning decisions, and future service scenarios are transparent to all stakeholders. Improving visibility into these factors will build trust, facilitate better regulatory alignment, and support community engagement in future planning decisions.

"We faced shared challenges in adapting to evolving regulations. Collaboration is essential to understanding these changes and ensuring they are reflected in long-term capital planning."

What we've heard from our water leaders

Doing this well in a broadly similar way will aid consistent development of community water literacy. And collaborating on the 'how' for future planning ways of working will help water utilities converge on foundations and new practices more quickly which reflect a breadth of understanding of regulatory requirements, as well as the expectations and preferences of communities and customers.