Water quality standards across the world are being re-written to promote healthier ecosystems, ensure safe potable water sources, increased biodiversity, and enhanced ecological functions. Treatment wetlands are used for treating a variety of pollutant waters, including municipal wastewater, agricultural and urban runoff, industrial effluents, and combined sewer overflows, among others. Treatment wetlands are particularly well-suited for sustainable water management because they can cope with variable influent loads, can be constructed of local materials, have low operations and maintenance requirements compared to other treatment technologies, and they can provide additional ecosystem services. The technology has been successfully implemented in both developed and developing countries.

The first IWA Scientific and Technical Report (STR) on Wetland Technology was published in 2000. With the exponential development of the technology since then, the generation of a new STR was facilitated by the IWA Task Group on Mainstreaming Wetland Technology. This STR was conceptualized and written by leading experts in the field. The new report presents the latest technology applications within an innovative planning framework of multi-purpose wetland design. It also includes practical design information collected from over twenty years of experience from practitioners and academics, covering experiments at laboratory and pilot-scale up to full-scale applications.

Scientific and Technical Report No.27