Engaged Research for Urban Water Resilience

Dear Colleagues,

Climate change is happening faster than scientists projected a decade ago, and cities are bearing a large part of the impact. Climate research to date has focused on the important task of measuring and projecting the impact, but we also need research that engages with cities to build resilience. A great deal of new research on urban resilience is confined within the bounds of academic disciplines, with limited relevance to problem solving and decision-making. We now urgently need engaged and transdisciplinary research to build the capacity of cities to adapt to climate risks. This is particularly crucial in the Global South, where locally engaged research capacity is often limited. Recent years have seen participatory and action research emphasizing the need to bring research closer to practice and decision making, yet challenges remain as to how researchers wishing to advance such approaches actually engage with the stakeholders in urban water planning and governance reforms, marred with conflicts and contestations. This Special Issue aims to showcase an emerging strand of engaged research that aims to catalyze urban water resilience by harnessing the power of dialogue and joint learning between researchers and the urban water management community. We are looking for papers by engaged researchers and practitioners, reflecting on their research practice and social experiments conducted in cities of the Global South. We invite contributors who have used research as a process of co-learning collaborative problem-solving and innovation development around urban water resilience, covering operational, system-wide, and cross-scale processes of change. The papers we seek not only identify city-specific climate change impacts on water, but demonstrate practical and policy insights into how the work of engaged research can catalyze capacity building, planning, governance, and innovation which can help build resilience of urban water systems to the impacts of climate change.

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Water is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• urban water
• resilience
• transdisciplinary research
• engaged research
• actionable knowledge
• water governance
• systems transformation
• urban transitions
• water and climate change