This water efficiency project is being developed in the city of Buin, a semi-urban locality situated in the heart of the Maipo River basin, in Chile’s Metropolitan Region. This area is characterized by high demographic and agricultural pressure and is facing severe water stress due to overexploitation of the aquifer, prolonged droughts, and competition for the resource among urban, industrial, and agricultural users. Buin heavily relies on a potable water distribution network that has expanded over time without integrated hydraulic planning, resulting in significant water losses due to leaks, illegal connections, and structural deterioration of the pipelines.
Water use in the city is primarily directed toward domestic supply, covering more than 95% of the urban population. However, the system’s operational efficiency is well below recommended standards, with Non-Revenue Water (NRW) exceeding 35%. This situation entails not only economic and operational losses for the utility company but also avoidable pressure on local water sources.
The project proposes the integration of smart sensors for continuous monitoring in the most critical segments of the distribution network, enabling the early identification of invisible leaks, hidden losses, and points of structural degradation. This data is processed through a digital platform that supports data-driven decision-making, enabling predictive maintenance and rapid response. Through this approach, the project aims to reduce NRW and generate measurable volumetric water benefits (VWBs) under the VWBA 2.0 methodology, focused on loss reduction in existing urban networks.
Adopting this methodology ensures that the benefits are real, additional, and traceable, while also facilitating third-party validation and potential valuation under corporate water replenishment frameworks. The project thus has a direct environmental impact by reducing source extraction, minimizing waste, and improving the resilience of the distribution system—aligning with integrated water resource management principles and contributing to local, national, and global sustainability goals.
Buin’s potable water system faces a structurally critical operational inefficiency. Over 35% of the water produced is lost before reaching end users, amounting to thousands of cubic meters per day without traceability or economic and environmental recovery. These losses stem not from a single issue but from a combination of systemic factors: the age and lack of maintenance of a network partially built over 40 years ago, the presence of illegal connections, and the absence of continuous monitoring architecture to detect real-time leaks.
Most leaks are invisible: they occur in underground segments, hard-to-access areas, or locations where terrain prevents visual detection. As a result, the system operates reactively—interventions occur only when breaks are reported by residents or when pressure drops are detected in critical points. This reactive logic hinders planning, resource allocation, and prioritization.
Compounding the issue is the territorial context: Buin lies in one of Chile’s most water-stressed basins, the Maipo River, which has suffered a gradual reduction in flows due to prolonged droughts and overuse. Water lost through urban inefficiency competes with agricultural, ecological, and industrial demands. Every cubic meter lost represents not just a technical failure but a missed opportunity to strengthen urban water system resilience amid climate change.
The lack of digitalization in the hydraulic system also prevents accurate quantification of NRW per subzone, limiting the ability to design sector-specific policies based on consumption type or infrastructure age. Without visibility, there is no management—and without management, no improvement is possible. Therefore, this problem is not only technical—it is also institutional, economic, and environmental.
To comprehensively address the issue of Non-Revenue Water (NRW) in Buin, a mitigation strategy composed of multiple complementary and coordinated solutions is proposed. This strategy focuses on digitalization, early detection, and modernization of the water distribution system. The key actions include:
Installation of smart sensors: Acoustic, differential pressure, and flow sensors will be installed in the most vulnerable and strategic sections of the network. These sensors detect hydraulic anomalies such as pressure drops, abrupt changes in consumption, or vibration patterns indicating leaks.
Hydraulic segmentation of the network: The system will be divided into District Metered Areas (DMAs), allowing comparison between water volume entering and consumed in each sector. This enables rapid detection of losses and hidden leaks.
Real-time monitoring platform: All data collected by the sensors will be integrated into a digital platform that enables real-time visualization, modeling, alerts, and prioritization of sectors with losses.
Data-driven predictive maintenance: Instead of responding after an incident occurs, a predictive maintenance model will be established, with operational teams acting based on alerts generated by sensors and analytics, reducing response time and operational costs.
Training of technical and operational staff: Targeted training will be provided for municipal and utility personnel in data interpretation, sensor management, and modern methodologies for maintenance and repair.
Renewal of critical sections: As a complement to digitalization, the physical renewal of pipeline segments with recurring failures and structural obsolescence will be carried out, prioritizing areas with the highest accumulated flow loss.
External auditing and results traceability: A traceability system will be implemented to record every event detected, validated, and corrected. This will allow for third-party auditing and generation of metrics compatible with international methodologies such as VWBA, CDP Water, and SBTs.
SDG 6 – Clean Water and Sanitation: Improves water use efficiency and service sustainability by significantly reducing water lost before reaching the end user.
SDG 9 – Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure: Implements resilient, modern technological infrastructure through smart sensor installation, network segmentation, and an advanced digital platform.
SDG 11 – Sustainable Cities and Communities: Promotes a more resilient and equitable urban environment by ensuring a more efficient, stable, and reliable water service for the community.
SDG 12 – Responsible Consumption and Production: Promotes more efficient use of natural resources by reducing water losses in the distribution system, decreasing unnecessary consumption, and preventing the waste of a critical resource.
SDG 13 – Climate Action: Reduces emissions associated with pumping, capturing, and treating previously wasted water, lowering the carbon footprint of the urban water system.
SDG 17 – Partnerships for the Goals: Builds on a collective action strategy involving the municipality, the utility company, technology providers, and potential external financiers, promoting a collaborative water governance model supported by verifiable data and shared objectives.
The project’s execution is structured into three phases: technical diagnosis and hydraulic sectorization; technological implementation and digitalization; and consolidation through predictive maintenance and VWBA reporting. These phases are coordinated with the utility company, the municipality, and a specialized provider of intelligent water solutions. The investment is expected to be shared among the public sector, private entities, and potential sources of climate finance.
Institutional coordination will be key to the project’s long-term sustainability. To ensure this, a local technical roundtable will be established with representation from all relevant stakeholders. This body will not only monitor the progress of activities but also align expectations, facilitate operational adoption, and promote community ownership of the benefits achieved. The project also aims to involve grassroots organizations and environmental NGOs active in the Maipo basin to ensure territorial coherence and synergies with other ongoing water restoration or efficiency projects.
In the city of Buin—located within one of Chile’s most water-demanded and vulnerable basins—invisible water losses due to leaks represented a chronic obstacle to sustainability. The urban infrastructure, aged and reactive, was unable to meet the efficiency demands required in a context of increasing water stress. Within this scenario, an innovative hydraulic digitalization strategy was implemented, incorporating smart sensors and a real-time data analytics platform.
The information collected enabled the detection of previously invisible leaks, reduced repair times, optimized resource allocation, and generated robust traceability for external reporting and validation. Each intervention was recorded, audited, and aligned with Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting (VWBA) methodologies, which not only improved technical-operational performance but also made the project eligible for results-based financing and collaborative partnerships.
Thanks to this intervention, the city began recovering water flows that were previously lost, reduced pressure on the Maipo aquifer, improved the resilience of the urban potable water service, and made a direct contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. The project became a replicable model for other municipalities in Chile and Latin America, showcasing how data, technology, and collaborative governance can transform urban water management in highly vulnerable environments.
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