Anticipatory Governance
The planning profession has developed the idea of anticipatory governance to address problems of deep uncertainty.
Guston distinguished between precaution and anticipation in dealing with complex problems of deep uncertainty [31].
Precaution is a way of acting that avoids predicted but uncertain risks; anticipation implies building capacity to resp.
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Do public and private decision-makers make assumptions about water availability?
On the other hand, public and private decision-makers planning for agricultural, industrial or urban growth will often make implicit assumptions about the amount of water that will be available in the future, often viewing the delivery of water as a technical matter rather than an economic challenge integral to their planning.
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Elements of Robust Decision Making
Robust adaptive strategies are “comprised of shaping actions intended to influence the future, hedging actions intended to reduce vulnerability if adverse futures come to pass, and signposts, which are observations that warn of the need to change strategies” [29]. Hedging actions in the water sector have traditionally involved building redundancies.
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Is the water sector progressing?
Progress has been limited, however, and overall too slow.
One missing piece has been the lack of a rigorous analytical framework to facilitate decision-making and investment into the sector, particularly on measures of efficiency and water productivity.
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Problems of Deep Uncertainty
Standard methods of risk analysis from a variety of disciplines, including game theory, economics, operations research, and statistical decision theory, have been successfully applied to policy problems for many decades.
These methods are adequate for problems in which system behavior is predictable—situations in which probability functions are kno.
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Scenario Planning
Scenario planning is designed to cope with the uncertainty and unpredictability of the future.
Scenario planners conduct group exercises and create narratives or storylines about the long-term future.
These exercises often construct a small number of stories from qualitative discussions.
Even quantitative analyses that produce hundreds and thousand.
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Simulation/Exploratory Modeling
Many, but not all, scenario planning processes use simulation models to represent complex human-natural coupled systems and to anticipate how they respond to various biophysical changes and policy decisions.
Bankes makes a useful distinction between consolidative modeling which uses known facts to replicate an actual system and exploratory modeling.
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Why is water scarcity a major challenge to global economic development?
Many countries face water scarcity as a fundamental challenge to their economic and social development; by 2030 over a third of the world population will be living in river basins that will have to cope with significant water stress, including:
- many of the countries and regions that drive global economic growth
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Will the water sector become a sustainable solution?
There is little indication that, left to its own devices, the water sector will come to a sustainable, cost-effective solution to meet the growing water requirements implied by economic and population growth.
This study focuses on how, by 2030, competing demands for scarce water resources can be met and sustained.
The water, energy and food security nexus according to the Food And Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO), means that water security, energy security and food security are very much linked to one another, meaning that the actions in any one particular area often can have effects in one or both of the other areas.
The UNESCO World Water Assessment Programme was founded in 2000 in response to a call from the UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) to produce a UN system-wide periodic global overview of the status, use and management of freshwater resources.
To meet this challenge, WWAP coordinates the work of 31 UN-Water members and international partners, under the umbrella mechanism of UN-Water, in the production of the World Water Development Report (WWDR).
The WWDR is the UN flagship report on water issues; it is a comprehensive review, released every year with a different focus on different strategic water issues, that gives an overall picture of the state, use and management of the world’s freshwater resources and aims to provide decision-makers with tools to formulate and implement sustainable water policies.
