Water managers are facing an ever evolving landscape of challenges. Changes in water supply and demand result from a multitude of sources including changes in: the nature of drought and floods; land use and land cover; climate variability and change; economic activity; environmental water requirements; inter-catchment water trading; and technological advances in water delivery, treatment, and reuse to name a few. These challenges are further compounded by uncertainty and variation of above-mentioned changes in space and time. Long-term infrastructure and management decisions need to be made in the face of both deep uncertainty and non-stationarity. How we consider these changes while ensuring that water resource and flood protection systems are proactive, resilient, robust, and suitable for the requirements of the end user remains key.
In this session we invite contributions that explore tools for characterising and assessing water systems at local through to continental scales for the purposes of informing planning and decision making and quantifying the risks, resilience, or robustness of water systems.
Key topics: Water management, Decision making, Uncertainty, Climate variability