Quantification of resilience to water scarcity, a dynamic measure in time and space
There are practical links between water resources management, climate change adaptation and sustainable development leading to reduction of water scarcity risk and re-enforcing resilience as a new development paradigm. Water scarcity, due to the global change (population growth, land use change...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2016-05-01
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| Series: | Proceedings of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences |
| Online Access: | https://www.proc-iahs.net/373/13/2016/piahs-373-13-2016.pdf |
| Summary: | There are practical links between water resources
management, climate change adaptation and sustainable development leading to
reduction of water scarcity risk and re-enforcing resilience as a new
development paradigm. Water scarcity, due to the global change (population
growth, land use change and climate change), is of serious concern since it
can cause loss of human lives and serious damage to the economy of a region.
Unfortunately, in many regions of the world, water scarcity is, and will be
unavoidable in the near future. As the scarcity is increasing, at the same
time it erodes resilience, therefore global change has a magnifying effect
on water scarcity risk. In the past, standard water resources management
planning considered arrangements for prevention, mitigation, preparedness
and recovery, as well as response. However, over the last ten years
substantial progress has been made in establishing the role of resilience in
sustainable development. Dynamic resilience is considered as a novel measure
that provides for better understanding of temporal and spatial dynamics of
water scarcity. In this context, a water scarcity is seen as a disturbance
in a complex physical-socio-economic system. Resilience is commonly used as
a measure to assess the ability of a system to respond and recover from a
failure. However, the time independent static resilience without
consideration of variability in space does not provide sufficient insight
into system's ability to respond and recover from the failure state and was
mostly used as a damage avoidance measure. This paper provides an original
systems framework for quantification of resilience. The framework is based
on the definition of resilience as the ability of physical and
socio-economic systems to absorb disturbance while still being able to
continue functioning. The disturbance depends on spatial and temporal
perspectives and direct interaction between impacts of disturbance (social,
health, economic, and other) and adaptive capacity of the system to absorb
disturbance. Utility of the dynamic resilience is demonstrated through a
single-purpose reservoir operation subject to different failure (water
scarcity) scenarios. The reservoir operation is simulated using the system
dynamics (SD) feedback-based object-oriented simulation approach. |
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| ISSN: | 2199-8981 2199-899X |