The IAWD family celebrates its 30^th anniversary these days, and Voice of the Danube will take the occasion to look back, forward – and into our community: Today, we introduce the "Member of the Month" Special Feature Series.

"Member of the Month" is a series of special features that provide insights into the work of our members, the successes they achieve, the challenges they overcome, and the thinking behind their IAWD memberships.

We introduce "Member of the Month" because we all know very well that IAWD's success is driven by lively communication, mutual support and shared know-how and experiences. The better we get to know each other, the more positive energy feeds into our community.

Now – where to start? Maybe we best turn to the place where it all began: Vienna. Vienna Water, the municipal water utility company of the Austrian capital, enjoys a unique position as the 100% public-owned water infrastructure operator that has incorporated a Charta of ten paragraphs on water quality and water protection. While IAWD celebrates its 30^th anniversary in 2023, the City of Vienna celebrates 150 years of its water supply system this year.

It operates a pipe network of over 3000 kilometers, delivering an average 370.000 cubic meters of water to Vienna's 1,9 million inhabitants. Vienna enjoys an exceptional water quality, drawing most of its water from up to 200 km long pipelines that connect the city's network with mountain springs on pristine – and rigorously protected - alpine slopes.

Vienna Water manages the municipal network, the long-distance pipelines, the source areas in neighboring Lower Austria and Styria and 16 powerplants along the pipelines producing electricity from the water flows, supplemented by a steadily growing number of photovoltaic installations.

Following a defined strategy that covers the decades until 2050, Vienna Water engages in digitalization, further ecological improvements and measures to cover the growing demand of a dynamically growing city faced with runaway climate change.

From this safely settled position, Vienna Water has long engaged in the support of utilities that operate in more difficult environments. The biggest boost in this respect was the fall of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent turbulent changes in the European political landscape.

Institutionalizing a culture of mutual support, knowledge-sharing and the propagation of best practices was a logical step, and in 1993 Vienna Water and numerous sister utilities in the Danube region convened to found the International Association of Water Service Companies in the Danube River Catchment Area (IAWD).

For the longest time, the IAWD was managed from the Vienna Water offices, and to this day, our community gathers in Vienna for the biannual Danube Water Conference – which by the way, will be held again this year, together with a proper 30^th Anniversary celebration.

Please follow the link below to learn more about Vienna Water!