A Participatory Approach to Assess the Effectiveness of Responses to Cope With Flood Risk

This work illustrates the preliminary findings of a participatory research process aimed at identifying responses for sustainable water management in a climate change perspective, in two river basins in Europe and Asia. The paper describes the methodology implemented through local workshops, aimed at eliciting and evaluating possible responses to flood risk. Participatory workshops allowed for the identification of four categories of possible responses and a set of nine evaluation criteria, three for each of the three pillars of sustainable development. The main outcome of such activities consists in the ranking of broad response categories instrumental to the objective of the Brahmatwinn research project, i.e. the identification of Integrated Water Resource Management Strategies (IWRMS) based upon the issues and preferences elicited from local experts. The mDSS tool was used to facilitate transparent and robust management of the information collected through Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and communication of the outputs.Participatory Process, Climate Change, Flood Risk, Decision Support System, Multi Criteria Analysis, MCA, Eliciting Responses, Evaluating Responses, Integrated Water Resources Management, IWRM, Mulino Decision Support System, mDSS

A participatory approach for assessing alternative climate change adaptation responses to cope with flooding risk in the upper Brahmaputra and Danube river basins

This work illustrates the preliminary findings of a participatory research process aimed at identifying responses for sustainable water management in a climate change perspective, in two river basins in Europe and Asia. The paper describes the methodology implemented through local workshops, aimed at eliciting and evaluating possible responses to flooding risk. Participatory workshops allowed for the identification of four categories of possible responses and a set of nine evaluation criteria, three for each of the three pillars of sustainable development. The main result of such activities consists in the ranking of broad response categories, to contribute to the orientation of the Brahmatwinn research project towards the identification of Integrated Water Resource Management Strategies (IWRMS) well grounded upon the issues and preferences elicited from local experts. The mDSS tool was used to facilitate transparent and robust management of the information collected through Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) and the communication of the outputs.Participatory process, Climate Change, Flooding Risk, Decision Support System, MCDA

AN INTEGRATED WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR ROBUST DECISION-MAKING IN A TRANSBOUNDARY RIVER BASIN: AN INTER-REGIONAL HYDRO-ECONOMIC APPROACH

Allocating limited amounts of freshwater among competing uses is challenging, particularly in transboundary river basins and under the impact of climate change and increasing demand for water associated with population growth and economic development. This calls for decision support tools that inform decision-makers about the consequences of their water management strategies and the impacts of changes in water availability due to climate change and socio-economic development. Hydro-economic models have proven to be promising for helping understand these impacts from an economic perspective. These models need to be integrated and capture both features of the water system and the economic interdependencies to be effective in multi-sectoral and multi-regional river basin contexts. Many of the hydro-economic models, however, adhere to either hydrological or administrative boundaries due to the limited availability of hydrological and economic data at relevant temporal and spatial scales. These models usually consist of a detailed representation of either the water or the economic system and a simplified representation of the other system. This is mainly because an integrated model including a detailed representation of both water and economic systems is extremely data-demanding and challenging to develop due to the different resolutions of datasets associated with these models. This dissertation attempts to address this gap by developing an integrated hydro-economic model that encompasses an entire transboundary river basin and consists of detailed water and economic components to inform decision-making about sustainable and robust water allocation. This is accomplished through these main steps: (1) developing an Inter-regional Supply-side Input-Output (ISIO) model incorporating water supply data for the transboundary Saskatchewan River Basin; (2) testing the temporal transferability of the ISIO model for different years in predicting the economic response of the river basin to changes in water availability under different climatic conditions; (3) coupling the ISIO model with a node-link water resources system model (MODSIM) to create an integrated hydro-economic model; (4) applying this integrated hydro-economic model to identify the sectoral and regional vulnerabilities of the river basin to changes in water supply; and (5) comparing the economic outcomes of the integrated hydro-economic model with those coming from an engineering model (the MODSIM model linked to a crop yield function) and the ISIO model. The contribution of this dissertation is developing an integrated hydro-economic model that couples detailed water resources system and inter-regional supply-side input-output models to identify sectoral and regional vulnerabilities of transboundary river basins to changes in water availability. The findings of this research have advanced our understanding of the cross-sectoral and inter-regional distribution of economic impacts of water allocation strategies and other drivers, including climate change and socio-economic development. This research also investigates, for the first time, the performance of supply-side input-output models that include water under different climatic conditions and over several years. This dissertation serves as an example for future integrated hydro-economic modelling attempts, particularly for informing decision-making about sustainable and robust water allocation in multi-sectoral and multi-regional river basins

Modelling to bridge many boundaries: the Colorado and Murray-Darling River basins

Increasing pressure on shared water resources has often been a driver for the development and utilisation of water resource models (WRMs) to inform planning and management decisions. With an increasing emphasis on regional decision-making among competing actors as opposed to top-down and authoritative directives, the need for integrated knowledge and water diplomacy efforts across federal and international rivers provides a test bed for the ability of WRMs to operate within complex historical, social, environmental, institutional and political contexts. This paper draws on theories of sustainability science to examine the role of WRMs to inform transboundary water resource governance in large river basins. We survey designers and users of WRMs in the Colorado River Basin in North America and the Murray-Darling Basin in southeastern Australia. Water governance in such federal rivers challenges inter-governmental and multi-level coordination and we explore these dynamics through the application of WRMs. The development pathways of WRMs are found to influence their uptake and acceptance as decision support tools. Furthermore, we find evidence that WRMs are used as boundary objects and perform the functions of ‘boundary work’ between scientists, decision-makers and stakeholders in the midst of regional environmental changes

Managing water quality under drought conditions in the Llobregat River Basin

[EN] The primary effects of droughts on river basins include both depleted quantity and quality of the available water resources, which can render water resources useless for human needs and simultaneously damage the environment. Isolated water quality analyses limit the action measures that can be proposed. Thus, an integrated evaluation of water management and quality is warranted. In this study, a methodology consisting of two coordinated models is used to combine aspects of water resource allocation and water quality assessment. Water management addresses water allocation issues by considering the storage, transport and consumption elements. Moreover, the water quality model generates time series of concentrations for several pollutants according to the water quality of the runoff and the demand discharges. These two modules are part of the AQUATOOL decision support system shell for water resource management. This tool facilitates the analysis of the effects of water management and quality alternatives and scenarios on the relevant variables in a river basin. This paper illustrates the development of an integrated model for the Llobregat River Basin. The analysis examines the drought from 2004 to 2008, which is an example of a period when the water system was quantitative and qualitatively stressed. The performed simulations encompass a wide variety of water management and water quality measures; the results provide data for making informed decisions. Moreover, the results demonstrated the importance of combining these measures depending on the evolution of a drought event and the state of the water resources system. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The authors would like to thank the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness for its financial support through the SCARCE (Consolider-Ingenio 2010 CSD2009-00065) and NUTEGES (CGL2012-34978) projects. We also value the support provided by the European Community's Seventh Framework Program in financing the SIRIUS (FP7-SPACE-2010-1, 262902), DROUGHT-R&SPI (FP7-ENV-2011, 282769) and ENHANCE (FP7-ENV-2012, 308438) projects. Moreover, we are grateful to the Catalan Water Agency for the data provided to develop this study.Momblanch Benavent, A.; Paredes Arquiola, J.; Munné, A.; Manzano, A.; Arnau Cosín, J.; Andreu Álvarez, J. (2015). Managing water quality under drought conditions in the Llobregat River Basin. Science of the Total Environment. 503-504:300-318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2014.06.069S300318503-50

Participatory modelling to support decision making in water management under uncertainty: Two comparative case studies in the Guadiana river basin, Spain.

A participatory modelling process has been conducted in two areas of the Guadiana river (the upper and the middle sub-basins), in Spain, with the aim of providing support for decision making in the water management field. The area has a semi-arid climate where irrigated agriculture plays a key role in the economic development of the region and accounts for around 90% of water use. Following the guidelines of the European Water Framework Directive, we promote stakeholder involvement in water management with the aim to achieve an improved understanding of the water system and to encourage the exchange of knowledge and views between stakeholders in order to help building a shared vision of the system. At the same time, the resulting models, which integrate the different sectors and views, provide some insight of the impacts that different management options and possible future scenarios could have. The methodology is based on a Bayesian network combined with an economic model and, in the middle Guadiana sub-basin, with a crop model. The resulting integrated modelling framework is used to simulate possible water policy, market and climate scenarios to find out the impacts of those scenarios on farm income and on the environment. At the end of the modelling process, an evaluation questionnaire was filled by participants in both sub-basins. Results show that this type of processes are found very helpful by stakeholders to improve the system understanding, to understand each others views and to reduce conflict when it exists. In addition, they found the model an extremely useful tool to support management. The graphical interface, the quantitative output and the explicit representation of uncertainty helped stakeholders to better understand the implications of the scenario tested. Finally, the combination of different types of models was also found very useful, as it allowed exploring in detail specific aspects of the water management problems

WATERSKETCH: TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE RIVER BASIN MANAGEMENT IN THE BALTIC SEA REGION

River basin planning in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR) has always been a complex, yet important topic, which has gained a new momentum with the approval of EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) in December 2000. The ultimate goal of WFD is to achieve a good ecological status/potential of all water bodies before 2015. Together with the implementation of WFD also principles of Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) are to be applied and national expansions of Natura 2000 networks are in progress.There are many elements which are important in river basin planning systems. In the Baltic Sea region for example, the pressures posed by economic activities including increasing tourism and port activities have to be considered in land and river basin planning. These matters are dealt with in the context of the Watersketch project, a scheme supported by the Interreg IIIB programme of the European Union. The project aims at producing an extensive planning system and a working scheme that accounts for the various, complex and opposing tasks currently subjected to water usage. The main goal is to produce and describe processes, that aid planning and decision making also in areas with limited resources to meet the diverse requirements concerning water. In addition, the project intends to:1) analyse and synthesize the different directives and conventions focused on use of water courses.2) demonstrate the major alternatives of river basin planning with a wide set of case studies ranging from southern tip of Baltic Sea (Poland) to northernmost corner of it (Norway).3) provide a Water Planning Decision Support System for spatial planners, which takes into account all main components needed for economically, socially and ecologically sustainable use of water courses.Raise capacity to promote the sustainable development in river basins by means of an information exchange platform, training workshops and the dissemination of the information needed for sustainable use of river basins by means of a handbook.By a combined approach where planning is complemented by training and information exchange, this project will provide a long-term contribution towards addressing the problem, at the same time that it links itself with other similar projects, achieving synergy and avoiding duplications

Water Resources Systems Planning and Management: An Introduction to Methods, Models and Applications

This 2005 version has been superseded by the 2017 edition, available in full here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/48159Throughout history much of the world has witnessed ever-greater demands for reliable, high-quality and inexpensive water supplies for domestic consumption, agriculture and industry. In recent decades there have also been increasing demands for hydrological regimes that support healthy and diverse ecosystems, provide for water-based recreational activities, reduce if not prevent floods and droughts, and in some cases, provide for the production of hydropower and ensure water levels adequate for ship navigation. Water managers are challenged to meet these multiple and often conflicting demands. At the same time, public stakeholder interest groups have shown an increasing desire to take part in the water resources development and management decision making process. Added to all these management challenges are the uncertainties of natural water supplies and demands due to changes in our climate, changes in people's standards of living, changes in watershed land uses and changes in technology. How can managers develop, or redevelop and restore, and then manage water resources systems - systems ranging from small watersheds to those encompassing large river basins and coastal zones - in a way that meets society's changing objectives and goals? In other words, how can water resources systems become more integrated and sustainable