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Restoring Urban Waterways in the Global South: Strategies, Progress and Co-benefits
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DOI：10.1007/s40726-026-00409-6.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Urban waterways are a vital part of a city’s socio-ecological infrastructure, supporting ecosystems, protecting public health and enhancing urban livability and sustainability. Urban waterways in the Global South are experiencing severe degradation due to rapid urbanization, industrialization, and inadequate sanitation infrastructure, posing adverse impact on public health, flood risk, and urban livability. While urban waterway restoration across developing countries has gained significant attention, existing evidence still remains fragmented. This review aims to bridge the gap by providing current knowledge on restoration strategies, governance frameworks, implementation progress, and documented environmental and socio-economic outcomes of urban waterway restoration in the Global South. The recent literature highlights a diverse urban waterway restoration across the Global South including canal daylighting, constructed wetlands, and community-based management. Studies indicates different technical adoption of nature-based solutions, grey infrastructure, blue–green infrastructure, and hybrid grey–green systems to address high pollution loads, informal urbanization, and resource constraints. Evidence across literature also shows increasing reliance on governance frameworks, particularly Integrated Urban Water Management and polycentric adaptive governance help address institutional fragmentation and enable coordinated action across sectors. This review clearly indicates a shift from single purpose, engineering-driven interventions toward integrated restoration approaches in the Global South. Effective restoration increasingly relies on integrated, context-specific approaches combining nature-based and hybrid infrastructure with adaptive and participatory governance. Across case studies, restoration delivers multiple environmental and socio-economic benefits, but outcomes remain uneven due to persistent constraints, including weak regulatory enforcement, limited long-term financing, competing land uses, and insufficient technical capacity. Overall, the review highlights the importance of reframing urban waterways as multifunctional infrastructure to enable scalable, durable restoration and to advance more resilient, healthy, and equitable urban systems.
Keywords:
Urban Water Pollution
Urban waterways
Natural-based Solutions
Blue-Green Infrastructure
Ecology
Global South
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