As traditional drivers continue to challenge the water sector, new and trending drivers require a paradigm shift utilities must reckon with.

In 2020, Arcadis identified a series of challenges water utilities faced and highlighted traditional asset management’s limitations in addressing those challenges. We proposed an advanced asset management framework with advanced enablers to help utilities successfully overcome these limitations and address their prevailing challenges.

While the enablers we proposed remain valuable today, particularly as traditional drivers like aging infrastructure and affordability continue to challenge the sector, in the last three years utilities have also been forced to reckon with the impacts of a global pandemic and its aftermath, increasingly extreme weather, and rising inflation, among other stressors. Environmental justice, water equity and climate resilience have also emerged as top drivers which are moving to the forefront of utilities’ asset management strategies and, while at long last, such priorities have introduced an entirely new set of considerations for utilities to manage. Advanced enablers that were sufficient a few years ago are simply no longer enough.

This paper, created in collaboration with Bluefield Research, revisits traditional drivers and takes a closer look at the pressing drivers utilities are faced with today. While advanced asset management is still the answer, the emergence of new challenges is requiring the industry to shift.

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