Ensuring sustainable water management in urban areas is vital due to the increasing demands and resource constraints driven by rapid urbanization. This expansion presents significant challenges for resource management, requiring actions to ensure sustainability and mitigate resource depletion. Water managers must enhance efficiency across the entire water cycle, as processes like water distribution are major energy consumers, with wastewater treatment also being highly energy-intensive. Despite the critical nature of these tasks, there is a notable lack of sustainable methodologies that are applicable to urban water systems (UWSs), highlighting the need for innovative strategies that assess sustainability across all dimensions, not just environmental ones. This research addresses this gap by proposing a new methodology to measure and categorize UWSs based on their contributions to sustainability. The developed methodology assesses water systems and establishes a benchmarking framework on sustainable aspects. The procedure enables the evaluation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in any water system, establishing four levels of sustainability benchmarking. These indicators were applied to 110 worldwide case studies, facilitating benchmarking on sustainable aspects and demonstrating the methodology's effectiveness. A specific case study showed a 22% reduction in energy consumption and a 57% achievement of SDG targets in a wastewater treatment plant. Additionally, applying the methodology to six real supply systems in Spain demonstrated a 42% compliance with sustainability targets. These findings provide water managers with a robust tool for decision making, enabling the optimization of system performance across the entire water cycle and alignment with global sustainability goals. This research fills a critical gap by offering a versatile and comprehensive approach to evaluating and improving the sustainability of urban water systems.

The authors would like to acknowledge the grant PID2020–114781RA-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.