Ana Mijic

Imperial College London | Imperial · Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

The integrated water systems (IWSs) concept involves managing water quantity and quality through dynamic interactions. This paper reviews the terrestrial water cycle, focusing on resilience and adaptive planning (AP) approaches within IWSs. We examine how integrating these approaches can improve IWS management and planning, addressing their inheren...

Problems of water system integration occur when a model's boundaries are too narrow to capture interactions and feedbacks across the terrestrial water cycle. We propose that integrated water systems models are required to overcome them and are necessary to understand emergent system behaviour, to expand model boundaries, to evaluate interventions,...

To address urban growth, resource competition, and environmental degradation, effective integrated water planning is crucial. In the UK, policy frameworks like the 25-Year Plan for the environment and the National Framework for Water Resources stress the need for a systemic approach. Despite efforts in stakeholder engagement and meta-models, integr...

Climate change imposes significant pressure on existing urban water systems. Prolonged low-flow periods, attributed to shifting climatic conditions, swiftly reduce the available water storage in reservoirs and threaten the quality of river water. This paper introduces a framework for assessing the environmental dynamic resilience (EDR) of urban wat...

Recently, surveillance technology was proposed as an alternative to flood monitoring systems. This study introduces a novel approach to flood monitoring by integrating surveillance technology and LiDAR data to estimate river water levels. The methodology involves deep learning semantic segmentation for water extent extraction before utilizing the s...

Problems of water system integration occur when a model’s boundaries are too narrow to capture interactions and feedbacks across the water cycle. We propose that integrated water systems models are required to overcome them, and are necessary to understand emergent system behaviour, to expand model boundaries, to evaluate interventions, and to ensu...

The importance of easy wayfinding in complex urban settings has been recognized in spatial planning. Empirical measurement and explicit representation of wayfinding, however, have been limited in deciding spatial configurations. Our study proposed and tested an approach to improving wayfinding by incorporating spatial analysis of urban forms in the...

While the land use‐street network nexus is well acknowledged, evidence for the one‐way impacts of land‐use patterns on street accessibility is still inadequate. The measurements of land‐use patterns and street accessibility lack systematic knowledge. Their empirical correlations also lack geographical variability, constraining site‐specific land‐us...

Improving river water quality at critical checkpoints, defined as locations with significant impacts on water use, to satisfy regulation standards is an important goal of sustainable catchment management. Challenges remain in investigating pollution hotspots, designing efficient target reduction, and evaluating management performance. To address th...

Nature-based solutions (NBS) have co-benefits for water availability, water quality, and flood management. However, searching for optimal integrated urban-rural NBS planning to maximise co-benefits at a catchment scale is still limited by fragmented evaluation. This study develops an integrated urban-rural NBS planning optimisation framework based...

Globally, urban areas face multiple challenges owing to climate change. Urban greening (UG) is an excellent option for mitigating flood risk and excess urban heat. Rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems can cope with plant irrigation needs and urban water management. In this study, we investigated how UG and RWH work together to mitigate environmental...

We set out a method for integrating strategic planning across water resources, wastewater, environment and flooding. We draw on work for the OxCam Arc IWMF and on the capability of Imperial College CSEI's integrated planning tool WSIMOD.

Land use planning regulates surface hydrological processes by adjusting land properties with varied evapotranspiration ratios. However, a dearth of empirical spatial information hampers the regulation of place-specific hydrological processes. Therefore, this study proposed a Local Land Use Planning framework for EvapoTranspiration Ratio regulations...

The urban heat island effect (UHI) has been widely observed globally, causing climate, health, and energy impacts in cities. The UHI intensities have been found to largely depend on background climate and the properties of the urban fabric. Yet, a complete mechanistic understanding of how UHIs develop at a global scale is still missing. Using an ur...

A well-developed Green and Blue-Green Infrastructure (GI/BGI) network provides a range of ecosystem services, which are defined as all benefits provided to humans from the natural environment. These might include improvements in water and air quality, flood risk mitigation, amenity and biodiversity values, as well as positive influences on the loca...

Biomonitoring of water quality and catchment management are often disconnected, due to mismatching scales. Considerable effort and money are spent each year on routine reach-scale surveying across many sites, particularly in countries like the UK, where nationwide sampling has been conducted using standardised techniques for many decades. Most of t...

The climate emergency and population growth threaten urban water security in cities worldwide. Growth, urbanisation, and changes to way of life have increased housing demand, requiring cities such as London to increase their housing stock by more than 15% over the next 10 years. These new urban developments will increase water demand, urban flood r...

Biomonitoring of water quality and catchment management are often disconnected, due to mismatching scales. Great effort and money is spent each year on routine reach-scale surveying across many sites, particularly in the UK, and typically with a focus on pre-defined indicators of organic pollution to compare observed vs expected subsets of common m...

The rights all people have for involvement in environmental decision making has long been established yet collaborative resource management has had mixed success. Natural capital; the renewable and non‐renewable natural assets that benefit societies, and the flow of ecosystem services these assets provide, are increasingly promoted as approaches th...

Natural capital plays a central role in urban functioning, reducing flooding, mitigating urban heat island effects, reducing air pollution, and improving urban biodiversity through provision of habitat space. There is also evidence on the role played by blue and green space in improving physical and mental health, reducing the burden on the health...

The planning of green-blue spaces (GBSs) requires considering the pedestrian needs in their walking routes for improving the walking experience. Incorporating the quantitative spatial characteristics of pedestrian movement is essential for pedestrian-friendly urban planning, which however received insufficient attention. Based on the space syntax t...

The role of Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS) in reducing combined sewer overflows (CSOs) and flood volumes can be accurately assessed using the available high-fidelity sewer network modelling software packages in the market. However, these tools are too slow for a range of modern applications such as optimisation or uncertainty analysis where lo...

Existing, high‐fidelity models for sewer network modeling are accurate but too slow and inflexible for modern applications such as optimization or scenario analysis. Reduced complexity surrogate modeling has been applied in response to this, however, current approaches are expensive to set up and still require high‐fidelity simulations to derive pa...

Floods are the most frequent type of natural disaster that cause loss of life and damages to personal property and eventually affect the economic state of the country. Researchers around the world have been made significant efforts in dealing with the flood issue. Computer vision is one of the common approaches being employed which include the use...

One-size-fits-all approach is common in climate-sensitive urban design due to neglecting spatial heterogeneities in urban form and urban climate. This study explores a spatially-varied climate-sensitive urban design based on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA). Three thermal indices, the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT), the Appar...

The interest in visual-based surveillance systems, especially in natural disaster applications, such as flood detection and monitoring, has increased due to the blooming of surveillance technology. In this work, semantic segmentation based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) was proposed to identify water regions from the surveillance images. Th...

We thank Prof Elms for his insightful comments and suggestions. The paper was indeed aimed at setting the future direction for the Centre for Systems Engineering and Innovation (CSEI) at Imperial College London, with the hope that the ideas will inspire others who work in the same or similar area of research. We are pleased to see that Prof Elms en...

Spatially-invariant land use and cover changes (LUCC) are not suitable for managing non-stationary drought conditions. Therefore, developing a spatially varying framework for managing land resources is necessary. In this study, the Dongjiang River Basin in South China is used to exemplify the significance of spatial heterogeneity in land planning o...

Managing river quality is important for sustainable catchment development. In this study, we present how catchment management strategies benefit from a coordinated implementation of measures that are based on understanding key drivers of pollution. We develop a modelling approach that integrates environmental impacts, human activities, and manageme...

Existing tools for sewer network modelling are accurate but too slow for a range of modern applications such as optimisation or uncertainty analysis. Reduced complexity sewer network models have been developed as a response to this, however, current applications are slow to set up and still require high-fidelity models to be run for calibration. In...

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, citizens of the United Kingdom were required to stay at home for many months in 2020. In the weeks before and months following lockdown, including when it was not being enforced, citizens were advised to stay at home where possible. As a result, in a megacity such as London, where long-distance commuting is common, spa...

In the UK, decision makers use hydraulic model outputs to inform funding, connection consent, adoption of new drainage networks and planning application decisions. Current practice requires the application of design storms to calculate sewer catchment performance metrics such as flood volume, discharge rate and flood count. With flooding incidents...

Vegetation, as a fundamental element of urban green infrastructure, plays a vital role in mitigating urban flooding. Green infrastructure performance in mitigating floods depends on plant responses to meteorological forcing. This puts urban green infrastructure in risk under a changing climate. In this study, the resilience and efficiency of London...

The climate emergency and population growth are challenging water security and sustainable urban design in cities worldwide. Sustainable urban development is crucial to minimise pressures on the natural environment and on existing urban infrastructure systems, including water, energy, and land. These pressures are particularly evident in London, wh...

Placing water quality in rivers at the centre of water infrastructure planning and management is an important objective. In response there has been a range of ‘whole system’ analyses. Few studies, however, consider both abstraction (water removed from rivers) and discharge (water returned) to inform the future planning of water systems. In this wor...

The climate emergency and population growth are challenging water security and sustainable urban design in cities worldwide. Sustainable urban development is crucial to minimise pressures on the natural environment and on existing urban infrastructure systems, including water, energy, and land. These pressures are particularly evident in London, wh...

The climate emergency and population growth are challenging water security and sustainable urban design in cities worldwide. Sustainable urban development is crucial to minimise pressures on the natural environment and on existing urban infrastructure systems, including water, energy, and land. These pressures are particularly evident in London, wh...

At a time of system shocks, significant underlying challenges are revealed in current approaches to delivering infrastructure, including that infrastructure users in many societies feel distant from nature. We set out a research agenda on systems approaches to infrastructure, drawing on ten years of interdisciplinary work on operating infrastructur...

The urban water-energy nexus sits at the intersection of the global phenomena of water scarcity, energy transitions and urbanisation. Research found that end use dominates the water-energy nexus and that this component plays an important role in urban dynamics, but focussed on the Global North. We investigate the nexus of Mumbai and its long-term r...

Under pressures of climate change and population growth, it is crucial to address water security and sustainable urban development in our cities. This challenge is particularly important for London, where a shortage of housing has been experienced during last decades and the region is considered highly vulnerable to water shortages and floods. Acco...

Flood occurrence is increasing due to escalated urbanization and extreme climate change; hence, various studies on this issue and methods of flood monitoring and mapping are also increasing to reduce the severe impacts of flood disasters. The advancement of current technologies such as light detection and ranging (LiDAR) systems facilitated and imp...

Flood disasters are considered annual disasters in Malaysia due to their consistent occurrence. They are among the most dangerous disasters in the country. Lack of data during flood events is the main constraint to improving flood monitoring systems. With the rapid development of information technology, flood monitoring systems using a computer vis...

Placing water quality in rivers at the centre of water infrastructure planning and management is an important objective. In response there has been a range of 'whole system' analyses. Few studies, however, consider both abstraction (water removed from rivers) and discharge (water returned) to inform the future planning of water systems. In this wor...

Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SuDS) have gained popularity over the last few decades as an effective and optimal solution for urban drainage systems to cope with continuous population growth and urban sprawl. A SuDS provides not only resilience to pluvial flooding but also multiple other benefits, ranging from amenity improvement to enhanced...

The effects of anthropogenic water use play a significant role in determining the hydrological cycle of north India. This paper explores anthropogenic impacts within the regions’ hydrological regime by explicitly including observed human water use behaviour, irrigation infrastructure and the natural environment in the CHANSE (Coupled Human And Natu...

In the original publication of the article, the significant hatching (cross marks on some grids) is not visible.

The decreasing trend in rainfall in the last few decades over the Indo-Gangetic Plains of northern India as observed in ground-based observations puts increasing stress on groundwater because irrigation uses up to 70% of freshwater resources. In this work, we have analyzed the effects of extensive irrigation over the Gangetic Plains on the seasonal...

Briefing paper in collaboration with the Committee on Climate Change's Kathryn Brown on the need for systems approach to analyse benefits of Green Infrastructure for all urban sectors so that it can better support new financial models

Conventional triangular weirs have been originally developed to measure, divert, and control surface water. However, a special application of these weirs, such as for low flow measurements in full-scale monitoring of Green Infrastructure (GI), is not well investigated. Available head-discharge relationships for triangular sharp-crested weirs are on...

This research is investigating the trade-offs between the multiple ecosystem services of trees Trees are naturally sustainable as circular systems, providing multiple ecosystem services to mitigate and adapt to climate change Urban trees are nature-based solutions that provide us with multiple ecosystem services, such as stormwater control, carbon...

Cities must adapt their drainage systems to cope with the effects of land use and climate change on growing flood risk. However, the development of robust adaptation strategies remains a challenge due to the deep uncertainty surrounding future conditions. To address this problem, an Adaptation Tipping Points (ATP) approach was utilised to investiga...

As Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty methodologies are becoming more widely utilised, there has been a growth in the use and generation of Adaptation Pathways. These are meant to convey to policy makers how short-term adaptations can act as elements of longer-term adaptation strategies. However, sets of Adaptation Pathways do not convey the in...

Understanding water user behavior and its potential outcomes is important for the development of suitable water resource management options. Computational models are commonly used to assist water resource management decision making; however, while natural processes are increasingly well modeled, the inclusion of human behavior has lagged behind. Im...

Sustainable urban Drainage Systems (SuDS) have gained popularity over the last two decades as an effective and optimal solution to continuous population growth and urban creep. SuDS do not only provide resilience towards pluvial flooding but they also provide multiple benefits ranging from amenity improvement to ecological and social well-being ame...

Nowadays there is a need to overcome the effects caused by rapid urbanisation with more innovative methods. Recently, source control approaches, known as Low Impact Development (LID), are being used by urban planners to cope with water related problems and any other environmental issues due to their cost-effectiveness and reliability. To meet the n...