Water and Energy Systems in Sustainable City Development: A Case of Sub-saharan Africa

Current urban water and energy systems are expanding while increasing attention is paid to their social, economic and environmental impacts. As a research contribution that can support real-world decision making and transitions to sustainable cities and communities, we have built a model-based and data-driven platform combining comprehensive database, agent-based simulation and resource technology network optimization for system level water and energy planning. Several use cases are demonstrated based on the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA) city-region in Ghana, as part of the Future Cities Africa (FCA) project. The outputs depict an overall resource landscape of the studied urban area, but also provide the energy, water, and other resource balance of supply and demand from both macro and micro perspectives, which is used to propose environmental friendly and cost effective sustainable city development strategies. This work is to become a core component of the resilience.io platform as an open-source integrated systematic tool gathering social, environmental and economic data to inform urban planning, investment and policy-making for city-regions globally.