Preparing a region for the water demands of the future must involve a multi-sector approach and consider resilience threats other than droughts, a new report has concluded.
Water Resources South East (WRSE) has published a resilience framework to assess the suitability of any plans, projects or strategies aimed at improving resilience in the south east up to 2100.
The framework will be applied in the planning process to evaluate the merits of strategies including the value of work in the wider catchment, rather than simply focussing on cost.
WRSE said future systems and plans would be measured for their reliability, adaptability and evolvability as key metrics in the multi-sector water resource planning.
The group, which has published regional management plans for 20 years, said the new framework is broader than before to include multi-sectors and different water users not only public water supplies. Previously water strategies focused on drought, but this time a wider scope of challenges and their impacts are considered.
This will result in WRSE and other resource groups focusing on securing public water services and managing the risk of droughts, towards achieving greater resilience across a series of connected systems.
WRSE compiled three checks to evaluate an asset or system to make objective and rounded views of their overall resilience.
Any system must be able to perform under pressure in case of challenges to water supply or other shocks. WRSE said that often the simpler a resource is the more reliable and less vulnerable it is.
The adaptability of any system will be important so the assets can keep functioning if the situation changes over time. WRSE gave the example that a water supply network with good interconnectivity and a mix of supply types from abstraction, storage, water recycling, catchment solutions, will be more likely to be adaptable to maintain supplies under a wider range of shocks and stresses than an independent network that relies on a single source of supply.
Finally, “evolvability” will determine if the asset or system can transform and keep doing what is needed if the requirements change. For example, a reservoir could not change its design to accommodate more water whereas a desalination plant could have another module added or change its treatment.
Further to these three categories, projects would be assessed on a further nine metrics and below them 20 sub-metrics to quantify the effect of a scheme or strategy on resilience.
The next steps for WRSE will be to carry out resilience assessment of water systems in the south east region and evaluate the resilience of such systems for the coming 80 years. The group is consulting on this stage of its plan until July.