Abstract
Resilience has become a regulatory concept influencing investment decisions in the water and wastewater sector. However, current assessments predominantly focus on technical resilience and on engineering solutions. Here we propose an alternative, more holistic approach that captures multiple perspectives of resilience by eliciting and comparing cognitive maps of diverse agents both from within as well as external to a wastewater utility. We use Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping as a practical tool to elicit subjective views on resilience mechanisms and illustrate the methodology in co-production with professionals from the wastewater sector in the Belfast area (Northern Ireland). We find that the proposed participatory process facilitates a more “reflective”, “inclusive” and “integrated” assessment than current approaches. Screening for risks and vulnerabilities using this new approach can foster an integrated system perspective by (i) systematically identifying connections between (sub)systems which are normally assessed separately, (ii) detecting feedbacks between system components which may reveal unintended consequences of resilience interventions and by (iii) obtaining a wider portfolio of potential interventions to increase overall resilience. We conclude that the suggested approach may be useful for strategic planning purposes within a utility and for improving cross-departmental communication among both internal and external agents.
Highlights
Resilience has been at the centre of recent reflections on sustainability in the water and wastewater sector
In this study we propose a new approach that systematically screens for sources of vulnerability and simultaneously identifies resilience interventions
We believe this approach to be useful as it integrates a wide range of perspectives to identify possible vulnerabilities as well as resilience actions in a wastewater utility that could not be detected with purely quantitative methods
Summary
Resilience has been at the centre of recent reflections on sustainability in the water and wastewater sector. It expands the usual scope of service reliability under standard loading to exceptional low probability/high impact events which have traditionally been neglected (Butler et al, 2016). The focus of resilience in the water and wastewater industry is still predominantly technical in nature (Mullin and Kirchhoff, 2018). Resilience has different meanings in wastewater management, depending on the specific domain and objective it is applied to (Juan-García et al, 2017)
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