Three quarters of the world’s freshwater comes from forested watersheds and over a third of urban centres rely on forested watersheds for their drinking water. In an increasingly urbanized world, with two-thirds of the global population projected to live in cities by 2050, demands for natural resource and land-use may put pressures on ecosystems that support human life. This is particularly true in fast growing cities. These small and medium-sized cities are currently experiencing a rapid and often unplanned expansion of their population and urban sprawl, thus affecting the broader landscape and contributing to watershed degradation with cascading effects on water stress.

As these source forested watersheds typically lie outside the municipal management level of cities (in fact, many of these watersheds are as far as 100 km away), city planners are rarely aware of the importance of these forested watersheds and rely on the responsibility of other actors to sustainably manage them.