Climate Resilient Water Resources Management
For communities to be resilient to climate change, where resilience has been defined by the Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat) as “the ability to cope with, and recover from, disruption, and anticipate trends and variability in order to maintain services for people and protect the natural environment, now and in the future”, the water system, which comprises the physical and technological infrastructure and users, survives shocks and stresses, the people and organisations can accommodate these stresses in their day-to-day decisions, and institutional structures continue to support the capacity of people and organisations to fulfil their aims.
Elements of resilience
There are three generalisable elements of resilience in a society: systems, agents, and institutions:
- Systems: Populations require high levels of infrastructure to deliver essential services, for example, water supplies. When systems fail, they jeopardise human well-being in all affected areas and hamper economic activity until their function is restored. These systems include water supplies and the ecosystems that support these
- Agents: These are individuals, households, and private and public-sector organisations. They have differentiated interests and can change their behaviour based on strategy, experience, and learning. Resilience is not evenly spread across individuals and households with poverty, gender, ethnicity, and age all contributing to differing levels of vulnerability of social groups to climate hazards through quality of housing and location and access to services and social network
- Institutions: These are social rules or conventions that structure human behaviour, including social and economic interactions. They can be formal or informal, overt or implicit, and created to reduce uncertainty, to maintain continuity of social patterns and social order, and to stabilise human interaction in a more predictable manner
Integrated Water Resources Management and resilience
In Integrated Water Resources Management, there is no single action or strategy that will ensure water resources are resilient to climate change. Instead, resilience is achieved through many actions, building upon each other over time with people and institutions learning from past experiences and applying it to future decisions. These actions can be divided into hard actions and soft actions:
- Hard actions: These involve infrastructural solutions that mitigate flood and drought risks, for instance, the construction, upgrade, and maintenance of flood defences, the restoration of watercourses, enhancement of wetlands, and the construction of reservoirs
- Soft actions: These involve non-infrastructural means to enhance resilience to variability and extreme events, including risk assessments, institutional capacity building, and outreach and education.
The take-out
Enhancing resilience to climate change requires a range of actions to buffer individuals and communities from extreme events.
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