Abstract
Predicted climate change may significantly affect drinking water supply in urban areas. Local water stakeholders facing climate change will have to deal with uncertain information and unexpected events. To address this lack of data, the knowledge and experience of practitioners might be used to assess the potential impacts of climate change on different issues, including drinking water supply. This paper proposes a participatory approach to identify local issues associated with drinking water supply (from source to tap) in a climate change context. This approach relies on the experience and knowledge of local practitioners. The proposed approach was applied to the Québec City metropolitan area (Province of Quebec, Canada). It is based on assignment examples (in this case, a selected set of districts from the study territory) in order to generalize application to the entire territory. This approach helps stakeholders to rationally consider different dimensions and the complexity of drinking water supply.
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Notes
In this study, hazard is defined as the probability (unquantified) that a particular danger occurs within a given period of time (ISSMGE 2004).
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the Ouranos Consortium (http://www.ouranos.ca/en/) for supporting this study under the Climate Change and Urban Transformation Research-Action Project. The authors wish also to express their gratitude to Natural Resources Canada (http://www.nrcan.gc.ca/) and the Fonds Vert Québec (http://www.mddep.gouv.qc.ca/). The authors would also like to thank Martial Labarthe, Dominique Viens, Jean-Philippe Labbé-Tremblay, Catherine Dubois and Martin Laliberté, our colleagues and members of the Action-Research Project. Finally, authors are indebted to all the local actors who took part in the different meeting sessions for their unfailing and crucial feedback, and to the people who contributed to the data collection.
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Legay, C., Cloutier, G., Chakhar, S. et al. Estimation of urban water supply issues at the local scale: a participatory approach. Climatic Change 130, 491–503 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1366-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1366-6