26 research outputs found
Scenarios, sustainability, and critical infrastructure risk mitigation in water planning
This paper examines the state of water supply planning facing unprecedented
challenges for ensuring reliable, resilient, safe, and affordable water supplies in
Texas and throughout the US. Analysis of water planning methods and practices
reveals a robustly sophisticated quantitative modeling capability. Its focus is on
both near-term and long-term capital investment requirements and managing
operating costs. Water planning focuses on drought mitigation and flood risk
management as predominant concerns. But climate change is impacting whole
watersheds as well as water systems subject to sea level rise incursions that
disrupt wastewater systems. Significant cross-impacts between energy and water
add new risks to both energy and water infrastructure, with uncertainties still
difficult to robustly quantify. Energy-water nexus issues reflect deeper planning
challenges concerning critical infrastructures. Critical infrastructure planning
tends to be sectoral-specific even though interdependencies and cross impacts can
create broadly impactful cascade effects. Future-state water planning should be
done in the context of critical infrastructure planning. Both will benefit from
integrating qualitative scenario planning into established quantitative planning
models. Doing so expands the complexity that can be captured in planning while
providing narratives and using decision-making and public communications tools
Stakeholder perspectives to prevent soil organic matter decline in Northeastern Italy
A transition from conventional to more sustainable soil management measures (SMMs) is
required to reverse the current soil organic matter (SOM) losses in the agroecosystems. Despite the
innovations and technologies that are available to prevent SOM decline, top–down knowledge
transfer schemes that incentivize a certain measure are often ineffective. Here, we discuss relevant
outcomes from a participatory approach where researchers, farmers, practitioners and government
officials have discussed opportunities and barriers around SMM application to prevent SOM
decline. Within a series of workshops, stakeholders identified, scored, and selected SMMs to fieldtests and evaluated the benefits and drawbacks from their application. Results showed that the
stakeholders recognized the need for innovations, although they valued the most promising SMM
as already available continuous soil cover and conservation agriculture. In contrast, more innovative
SMMs, such as biochar use and the variable rate application of organic amendments through
precision farming, were the least valued, suggesting that people’s resistance to new technologies is
often governed by the socio-cultural perception of them that goes beyond the economic and
technological aspects. The valuation of benefits and drawbacks by stakeholders on trialed measures
emphasized that stakeholders’ perspective about soil management is a combination of economic,
environmental, and socio-cultural aspects, thus corroborating the need for transdisciplinary
bottom–up approaches to prevent SOM depletion and increase soil rehabilitation and SOM content
Recommended from our members
Considering Power System Planning in Fragile and Conflict States
Abstract Traditional methods of energy planning are likely to provide results that may be inappropriate in fragile and conflict-prone countries. The risks of violence and damage, or significant delays and cancellations in infrastructure development, are rife in these states. Thus, least-cost planning processes must explicitly address the inherent risks. While there are numerous statistical methods for dealing with decision making under uncertainty, few of them have been applied to power system planning and tailored for these situations. We present a general theoretical framing of the issue, and illustrate application of a very simple method to a case study of the Republic of South Sudan. We find that, in general, the resilience aspects, combined with modular and incremental benefits of distributed generation technologies and systems emerge as attractive options if the various risks of infrastructure development are included in modelling techniques
Sustainability assessments of regional water supply interventions – Combining cost-benefit and multi-criteria decision analyses
To cope with present and future challenges, a growing number of water utilities in Sweden, Europe and elsewhere initiate various forms of inter-municipal cooperations creating a new regional level of drinking water governance. In order to reach viable decisions of alternative ways forward, there is an international consensus that sustainability needs to be addressed in water supply planning, design and decision-making. There are, however, few decision aids focusing on assessing the sustainability of inter-municipal cooperations and the inter-municipal policies and interventions that regional decision-makers are faced with. This paper presents a decision support model based on a combination of cost-benefit analysis and multi-criteria decision analysis for assessing the sustainability of regional water supply interventions, including formations of inter-municipal cooperations. The proposed decision support model integrates quantitative and semi-quantitative information on sustainability criteria. It provides a novel way of presenting monetized benefits and costs, capturing utilitarian aspects of alternative interventions, with non-monetized social and environmental effects, capturing aspects based in the deontological theories of moral ethics. The model is based on a probabilistic approach where uncertainties are defined by statistical probability distributions. A case study is used to exemplify and evaluate model application in decision situations regarding regionalization, (de)centralization, source water quality and redundancy. All evaluated alternatives were expected to contribute to a slightly improved social sustainability, whereas the results were more varying in the economic and environmental domains. A structured and transparent treatment of uncertainties facilitates a better understanding of the results as well as communication between decision-makers, stakeholders and the community
Water planning in an age of change
This review paper examines a variety of methodologies that underpin current
water planning in the United States – spanning the city, state, and Federal scales –
and identifies ways in which changing realities and greater interdependencies
between various different critical infrastructures are driving the need for new
water planning approaches and processes. Specifically, new sources of uncertainty
and their implications are examined, and challenges relating to water supply,
allocation, decision making, safety and security, and the information and
processes of planning are delineated.
In this context, the usefulness of adding scenario planning to current water
planning processes is assessed, and ways in which it can be implemented
effectively are described. Opportunities for One Water planning to be augmented
by critical infrastructure planning and enhanced risk mitigation are also discussed.
Recommendations are articulated that are relevant to states, cities, and utility
agencies, in order to ensure that they are more resiliently prepared for a
substantially more uncertain planning environment in the future, with particular
attention to critical infrastructure for water and for other services and the
interrelationships between them
Selection of discrete multiple criteria decision making methods in the presence of risk and uncertainty
This paper presents a new methodology to recommend the most suitable Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method from a subset of candidate methods when risk and uncertainty are anticipated. A structured approach has been created based on an analysis of MCDM problems and methods characteristics. Outcomes of this analysis provide decision makers with a suggested group of candidate methods for their problem. Sensitivity analysis is applied to the suggested group of candidate methods to analyze the robustness of outputs when risk and uncertainty are anticipated. A MCDM method is automatically selected that delivers the most robust outcome. MCDM methods dealing with discrete sets of alternatives are considered. Numerical examples are presented where some MCDM methods are compared and recommended by calculating the minimum percentage change in criteria weights and performance measures required to alter the ranking of any two alternatives. A MCDM method will be recommended based on a best compromise in minimum percentage change required in inputs to alter the ranking of alternatives. Different cases are considered and some new propositions are presented based on potential generalized scenarios of MCDM problems. Keywords: Multiple criteria analysis, Robustness, Sensitivity, Decision making, Criteria weights, Performanc