Getting Outside the Water Box: The Need for New Approaches to Water Planning and Policy

Abstract

North American water systems are inadequately prepared to deal with an uncertain future climate and other uncertainties relevant to long-term sustainability. Despite Milly et al.’s (2008) dramatic proclamation in the February 2008 issue of Science that stationarity—the idea that natural systems function within a known envelope of variability—is dead, the water resources community has been slow to embrace new paradigms for long-term water planning and policy. Too much attention has been focused on reducing, clarifying, and representing climatic uncertainty and too little attention has been directed to building capacity to accommodate uncertainty and change. Given the limited ability to forecast the future climate, emphasis must shift to the human actors and social dynamics of water systems, including planning processes, work practices, operational rules, public attitudes, and stakeholder engagement. Many in the water management community have been led to believe that climate adaptation is primarily a science problem—that we need to wait for the results of new rounds of climate modeling and downscaling to reduce uncertainties about future climate conditions. Trenberth (2010), however, has noted that, as our knowledge of the climate system increases, so also has our understanding of factors we previously did not account for or even recognize, such as the release of greenhouse gases from melting permafrost, the fertilizing effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide on vegetation, and the effects of aerosols on clouds. As climate models begin to incorporate these processes, they will inevitably disagree about the nature, extent, and geographic patterns of climate-change impacts. Decision makers will be confronted with more, not less, uncertainty about the future climate. This uncertainty is problematic for an industry that has traditionally relied on predict-andplan methods of operations and management. Water planning usually involves forecasting future trends or desired states and then identifying the infrastructure needed to support them. Optimization models, the favored tools of water planners worldwide, seek the most efficient Water Resour Manage (2013) 27:955–957 DOI 10.1007/s11269-012-0222-y