Urban water crises: Making sense of climate change adaptation barriers and success parameters

Abstract

In this article, a comprehensive literature review was conducted to investigate why urban water organisations are still lacking climate change adaptation in their water security management and planning, the key barriers and how they could be solved and enabled. In addition, urban water crises in the last decade have been examined to emphasise what happened in recent times due to ignorance of water policy makers and decision takers to understand the significance of potential climate impacts on water, and to embark on adaptation measures. Barriers and success parameters in the literature were discussed with local water professionals of the Queensland tropics, Australia, to understand the applicability and importance of these parameters in the region. A selected group of 20 water professionals were interviewed to validate the climate change adaptation barriers and enablers in the broader context of the tropical Queensland. The study shows a strong need for case study-based research to capture in-depth understanding and challenges of climate change adaptation in the region. Lack of support from stakeholders, lack of holistic guidelines and ambiguous policy frameworks were identified as the most critical barriers for climate change adaptation in the Queensland tropics. Quantifiable terminologies to assess the success of climate change adaptation practice are preferred in the water sector, and calculable water security indicators, if correctly developed, can be valuable tools to measure and track the progress of climate change adaptation success in a local water sector.