Co-UDlabs project: collaborative Research Infrastructures research and innovation in the field of urban drainage

Urban drainage systems (UDS) are critical man-made infrastructures that directly interface with natural aquatic systems and control and convey wastewater and stormwater to both centralised and distributed facilities where they can be safely treated, reused whenever possible, or returned to the natural environment. UDS are crucial for protecting public health by limiting contact between people and pathogens, and for safely managing stormwater, reducing pollutants’ impact and urban flooding risks. However, urban settlements around the world face major urban drainage challenges: aging and deteriorating infrastructures, pathogens and other emergent pollutants entering streets and properties via sewer flooding, and natural surface waters being contaminated and their ecological status degraded by sewer overflows and contaminated surface runoff. These challenges are aggravated by global trends such as rapid urbanisation and climate change.

In this changing environment, more innovation and research are urgently needed to tackle these challenges, and large-scale research infrastructures (RIs) are essential to test, validate, and replicate new and effective, ground-breaking approaches. As water utilities, authorities and practitioners have traditionally been cautious innovation adopters, full or near-full scale testing has become essential to support and mainstream innovative solutions.

Co-UDlabs is a H2020-INFRAIA project that has developed Europe’s first network of RIs in the field of urban drainage systems. Launched in 2021, the project has successfully conducted 31 Transnational Access (TAs) projects across 16 large-scale field and laboratory facilities and seven different European research infrastructure providers. Co-UDlabs TA programme has involved more than 220 user-group members from 26 different countries and over 120 research and institutions and stakeholders, with industry users making up 33% of all participants.

By showcasing early and consolidated results of the studies conducted in its TA programme, Co-UDlabs will show how research network synergies and cooperation can allow researchers, utility providers, local governments, and regulators with access and control over all UDS processes and stages. These results include insights from UD processes such rainfall-runoff, surface wash-off, stormwater infiltration and evapotranspiration, wastewater collection systems, and their interactions with urban surfaces and soils, as well as the operation of infrastructure such as pipelines, pumping stations, overflow structures, and Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDS).

The TA programme and its collaborative framework were complemented by tailored research activities aimed at strengthening quality and quantity of UDS services offered at the European level. These activities shed light and developed innovative approaches to asset deterioration through machine-learning techniques, long-term resilience and sustainability of UDS via more robust, autonomous, and interconnected smart monitoring techniques and digital water data analysis tools. Co-UDlabs also began building a set of harmonised and replicable access tools to data collected in project activities, all consistent with established FAIR data principles. This presentation will cover all aspects above — RI accessibility, scientific cooperation, and data-based community-building — to show how crucial cross-institution and multidisciplinary synergies across research infrastructures will be when addressing key challenges of the present and the near future.