TY - JOUR
T1 - Sustainable water management under future uncertainty with eco-engineering decision scaling
AU - POFF, LeRoy
AU - Brown, Casey M
AU - Grantham, Theodore E.
AU - Matthews, John H.
AU - Palmer, Margaret A.
AU - Spence, Caitlin M.
AU - Wilby, Robert L.
AU - Haasnoot, Marjolijn
AU - Mendoza, Guillermo F.
AU - Dominique, Kathleen C.
AU - Baeza, Andres
N1 - cited By 11
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Managing freshwater resources sustainably under future climatic and hydrological uncertainty poses novel challenges. Rehabilitation of ageing infrastructure and construction of new dams are widely viewed as solutions to diminish climate risk, but attaining the broad goal of freshwater sustainability will require expansion of the prevailing water resources management paradigm beyond narrow economic criteria to include socially valued ecosystem functions and services. We introduce a new decision framework, eco-engineering decision scaling (EEDS), that explicitly and quantitatively explores trade-offs in stakeholder-defined engineering and ecological performance metrics across a range of possible management actions under unknown future hydrological and climate states. We illustrate its potential application through a hypothetical case study of the Iowa River, USA. EEDS holds promise as a powerful framework for operationalizing freshwater sustainability under future hydrological uncertainty by fostering collaboration across historically conflicting perspectives of water resource engineering and river conservation ecology to design and operate water infrastructure for social and environmental benefits.
AB - Managing freshwater resources sustainably under future climatic and hydrological uncertainty poses novel challenges. Rehabilitation of ageing infrastructure and construction of new dams are widely viewed as solutions to diminish climate risk, but attaining the broad goal of freshwater sustainability will require expansion of the prevailing water resources management paradigm beyond narrow economic criteria to include socially valued ecosystem functions and services. We introduce a new decision framework, eco-engineering decision scaling (EEDS), that explicitly and quantitatively explores trade-offs in stakeholder-defined engineering and ecological performance metrics across a range of possible management actions under unknown future hydrological and climate states. We illustrate its potential application through a hypothetical case study of the Iowa River, USA. EEDS holds promise as a powerful framework for operationalizing freshwater sustainability under future hydrological uncertainty by fostering collaboration across historically conflicting perspectives of water resource engineering and river conservation ecology to design and operate water infrastructure for social and environmental benefits.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84951335156&doi=10.1038%2fnclimate2765&partnerID=40&md5=37cd78e8bfc9e5d006c836c133a926d2
U2 - 10.1038/nclimate2765
DO - 10.1038/nclimate2765
M3 - Article
VL - 6
SP - 25
EP - 34
JO - Nature Climate Change
JF - Nature Climate Change
SN - 1758-678X
IS - 1
ER -