Abstract
Global threats such as climate change, population growth, and rapid urbanization pose a huge future challenge to water management, and, to ensure the ongoing reliability, resilience and sustainability of service provision, a paradigm shift is required. This paper presents an overarching framework that supports the development of strategies for reliable provision of services while explicitly addressing the need for greater resilience to emerging threats, leading to more sustainable solutions. The framework logically relates global threats, the water system (in its broadest sense), impacts on system performance, and social, economic, and environmental consequences. It identifies multiple opportunities for intervention, illustrating how mitigation, adaptation, coping, and learning each address different elements of the framework. This provides greater clarity to decision makers and will enable better informed choices to be made. The framework facilitates four types of analysis and evaluation to support the development of reliable, resilient, and sustainable solutions: “top‐down,” “bottom‐up,” “middle based,” and “circular” and provides a clear, visual representation of how/when each may be used. In particular, the potential benefits of a middle‐based analysis, which focuses on system failure modes and their impacts and enables the effects of unknown threats to be accounted for, are highlighted. The disparate themes of reliability, resilience and sustainability are also logically integrated and their relationships explored in terms of properties and performance. Although these latter two terms are often conflated in resilience and sustainability metrics, the argument is made in this work that the performance of a reliable, resilient, or sustainable system must be distinguished from the properties that enable this performance to be achieved.
Highlights
Few would argue with the view that the coming decades will see major challenges to the management of water in cities worldwide, with existing water infrastructure subject to many emerging threats, including climate change, urbanization, asset deterioration, limited resources, and tightening regulation
The World Health Organization has recognized the importance of water supply and sanitation resilience in the face of climate change in their 2030 vision (WHO and DFID 2009), and the resilience of water resources has been a focus of the IPCC (IPCC 2001)
This paper aims to provide such a “map” consisting of a set of basic definitions and concepts, a logical evaluation framework, and intervention strategies, enabling water problems and challenges to be addressed in a holistic manner (as recommended by the United Nations (2006))
Summary
Few would argue with the view that the coming decades will see major challenges to the management of water in cities worldwide, with existing water infrastructure subject to many emerging threats, including climate change, urbanization, asset deterioration, limited resources, and tightening regulation. Several resilience frameworks do exist in the literature (e.g., Cimellaro et al 2010; Francis and Bekera 2014; Balica, and Gourbesville 2014; Labaka et al 2016); there are inconsistencies in their approaches to resilience analysis, some measure properties not performance, and they are not typically widely transferable without amendment. These factors are likely to act as a barrier to their implementation, and there is a need for an overarching framework providing greater clarity, consistency, and applicability
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