Analysis techniques and tools to support water resources decision-making for an uncertain future

By Edie Zagona, Research Professor, Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering
Director, Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems (CADSWES)

Water resources planning and management must answer questions regarding what actions should be taken (e.g., new infrastructure, modified operations, re-allocations, water transfers, etc.) and when to act; the actions should be beneficial, cost-effective and in keeping with principles of sustainability. Planning for future management actions under deep uncertainty about the future calls for planning strategies that can adapt dynamically to future conditions. Scenario planning involves exploring many possible future scenarios for which probabilities are unknown and developing strategies to avoid vulnerable states. Robust decision-making provides a systematic way of developing a water management strategy to best adapt to a wide range of plausible future conditions. The technique uses water management models to evaluate candidate strategies against large sets of quantitative scenarios that reflect future uncertainty. One of the research thrusts at CADSWES is to develop techniques and tools that facilitate this type of analysis. This talk will describe the framework and some ongoing and future work in this area.