Marion Savill reports on the recent 10th IWA ASPIRE Conference, held in New Zealand.
We were thrilled to welcome a record 2253 delegates and exhibitors, from around 50 countries, to Christchurch (Ōtautahi) for the 10th IWA ASPIRE Conference and Water New Zealand Conference and Expo 2025, held in the city’s Te Pae Convention Centre and town hall.
Technical sessions
The event, from 29 September to 3 October, featured a comprehensive programme of technical sessions over 13 streams, including six streams of exclusively IWA ASPIRE presentations. There were 180 in total, spanning smart solutions, AI and digital innovation, and asset management – showcasing the best of global research and practical know-how.
Plenary discussions
Three morning plenaries and an afternoon session covered current hot topics, and set the stage for inspired discussions. Delegates explored myriad ideas, from Indigenous water and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) models to planetary boundaries, climate resilience, natural disaster recovery, and the future of our water workforce.
Collaboration with Indigenous communities
The first plenary session highlighted options and opportunities to strengthen governance, capacity, technology and knowledge management for safe and sustainable drinking water and sanitation services by and for Indigenous communities. Keynote speakers from New Zealand, Canada and Australia addressed policy frameworks, innovative governance structures, partnership building, cross-border coordination, and the promotion of nature-based solutions combining western and Indigenous knowledge.
Many delegates responded positively to the innovative governance approach proposed by Susheel Arora, CEO of the Canadian Atlantic First Nations Water Authority. This plenary set the tone for productive discussions in the three-session workshop.
Planetary boundaries
‘Planetary health and planetary boundaries: the concept and its implications for WASH utility management’ was the subject of the second session. Current resource use and waste generation is not compatible with the limited carrying capacity of our planet, and for many of the key determining factors, including freshwater (both blue and green), planetary boundaries have already been crossed. This means increased risks to the planet’s ecological integrity, with repercussions for climate stability, biodiversity and, ultimately, human health.
Earth lacks an umbilical cord, and therefore the risks can only be diminished by reducing excessive resource use and pollution. The discussion was put into a practical perspective for water professionals and practitioners, supported with policy and programme examples from New Zealand.
WASH regulation
We’ve seen a lot of recent developments around sanitation regulation, and the audience was updated on this in the third plenary session, ‘Strengthening regulatory frameworks: a focus on regulating sustainable sanitation services’.
The formulation of policies and the development of legislation for safely managed sanitation services were supported by last June’s launch of the IWA/WHO ‘Call to action on strengthening water and sanitation regulatory systems’, and by the creation of an enabling environment for regulation as proposed in the WHO ‘Roadmap for sanitation regulation’. Both the generic and the country-specific aspects of the process of sanitation regulation strengthening were covered in the session, the latter with an example from the Philippines.
Improving resilience
The final plenary, part of the IWA ASPIRE closing session, focused on using management systems to build resilience into drinking water, sanitation and wastewater services in the wake of natural disasters and extreme weather events. This explored the status of international policies and actions under the ‘Sendai Framework for disaster risk reduction’ and addressed, in national contexts, how resilience can be integrated better into infrastructure design and development, through construction methods and the choice of materials used, in restoration and upgrading efforts, in service delivery systems, and through community engagement.
Criteria for priority setting and decision-making on reconstruction and budgeting were also discussed, based on the experience of the drinking water utility in Melbourne, Australia, and in a district of New Zealand.
ASPIRE also featured a number of workshops, including one for utility leaders, a Young Water Professionals workshop and a regulators’ workshop, led by Water New Zealand.
Above all, ASPIRE brought together the world’s leading researchers, practitioners and innovators to connect, collaborate, and help create lasting change for the future of water.
The next IWA ASPIRE conference will be hosted by the Philippines and will take place in Manila in 2027. Watch this space for further announcements.
The author:
Marion Savill is Chair of IWA New Zealand and a Fellow of IWA
