The nature and human activities greatly influenced the availability of this scare natural resource, water in many complex ways. Planning and management of waters – from the rain falling onto the surface and discharging into the open sea is a major challenge with a multitude of facets.

With nearly 4 billion or 50% of all people on earth expected to live in urban areas by 2015, planners are faced with multi-facets challenges. Planners are seeking new ideas, technologies and approaches to strengthen its nation’s capacity to response to changes. In a land- scarce country like Singapore, planners have to carefully balance the trade-offs between many compelling priorities, to ensure not only we are able to meet the current needs, we remain sustainable in the future. Though with an annual rainfall of 2,400 millimetres a year, Singapore is water-scarce due to the limited amount of area where rainfall can be stored.

Research focus on Urban Planning and Water Management while taking the urban water systems and overall system performance into consideration includes:

• Urban drainage design
• Urban water quality & rainfall runoff modeling
• Characterization of tropical rainfall
• Characterization of urbanized catchments
• Catchment yields from tropical rainfalls
• Urban hydrology and flooding
• Sediment transport in urban drainage system
• Integrated modelling of urban water systems
• Integrated urban water management
• Urban water real-time information and decision support system