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Why Is Uncertainty a Game Changer for Water Policy and Practice?

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Book cover Building Resilience for Uncertain Water Futures

Abstracts

Climate change and its uncertain impacts on water systems has raised awareness of the limitations of current planning and management practices in the water sector. Global climate modeling and regional impact assessment are plagued with severe uncertainties stemming from natural variability, uncertain assumptions about future emissions, differences in how global models are structured, and what climate processes they include and exclude. The same model with slightly different initial conditions can give quite different results. Therefore, it is difficult to use them to predict future climate at local and regional scales. This chapter articulates the problem of climatic uncertainty, identifies other relevant uncertainties associated with demand and regulation, and discusses the challenges they present for water planning and decision-making.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Risk has different meanings in different communities of science and practice. The flood-risk hydrological community uses risk to represent the probability of occurrence and the consequences associated with an event. Risk factors into efforts to evaluate alternative infrastructure designs and operations of existing designs. The hazards community is more likely to see the risk of harm from natural events as socially constructed and linked to social, economic, and political processes that influence how hazards affect people with different intensities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA

    Patricia Gober

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  1. Patricia Gober
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Gober, P. (2018). Why Is Uncertainty a Game Changer for Water Policy and Practice?. In: Building Resilience for Uncertain Water Futures. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71234-5_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71234-5_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-71233-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-71234-5

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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