Introduction to the Special Issue on “Adaptation a

Authors: Suraje Dessai Alison Browne Julien J Harou

Publish Date: 2013/01/19

Volume: 27, Issue: 4, Pages: 943-948

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Abstract

Reliable water supply is fundamental to human health and wellbeing Climate change has the potential to affect water systems in a number of ways through changes in the water available for abstraction and storage through altered drought frequency and intensity and through changes in demand and changing risk of infrastructure failure While the precise details of these changes may be uncertain there is high confidence that global climate is changing thus making adaptation to an uncertain changing climate unavoidable Water managers have often planned under the assumption of a stationary climate This assumption is no longer valid under a changing climate and other socioeconomic changesThis special issue demonstrates the value of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to addressing the future adaptation and resilience of water systems The range of articles in this special issue largely based on work from the UK offers an interdisciplinary perspective on the issues associated with the adaptation and resilience of water systems to an uncertain changing climate Such themes will resonate with a broad international audience interested in water resources management and adaption to climate change This special issue has in large part emerged from research associated with the Adaptation and Resilience in a Changing Climate ARCCWater project funded by the EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council with cofunding by the ESRC Economic and Social Research Council As such it includes the findings and thoughts from a number of universities research institutions consultancies and government and nongovernment stakeholders involved in the ARCCWater project Some of the papers Browne et al Korteling et al Matrosov et al Pearce et al von Lany et al were presented at a session entitled “Sustainable water management under an uncertain changing climate” at the Royal Geographical Society RGSIBG Annual International Conference 2011 in London The session was convened by Suraje Dessai and Brett Korteling and sponsored by the RGS’s Climate Change Research GroupThe interdisciplinary nature of the review papers research articles and invited editorials presented in this special issue demonstrate the wide variety of themes that are of interest when it comes to climate change adaptation of water systems These include uncertainties associated with the impact of climate change on droughts Rahiz and New water resources Wade et al and freshwater environments Fai et al the uncertainties embedded in current approaches to forecasting demand Parker and Wilby and the use of quantitative approaches for water resources planning under deep uncertainty von Lany et al Korteling et al Matrosov et al The articles in this special issue also emphasize that future water system will be as much influenced by climate as by legislative and regulatory environments affecting the water consumers and producers Browne et al Pearce et al and encourages the multidisciplinary readership of Water Resources Management to engage with these diverse social political and economic issues and reflect upon how the sum of these different interdisciplinary parts will influence current practice and policy Finally given the UK focus of this special issue we invited three experienced scholars from three different continents Sofoulis Mujumdar Gober to share their thoughts and wisdom on the topic of this special issueThe invited editorial provided by Sofoulis reflecting on the Australian experience of water resources management in the face of drought and early climate change advocates an interdisciplinary multidisciplinary approach which prioritizes conceptual and methodological experimentalism and reflexivity but reflects on the difficulties for humanities and social science research ‘to count’ due to the privileging of positivist science She also reflects on the need to continue developing the emergent ‘partnership model’ which focuses on the comanagement of water resources These issues are addressed in various degrees in the other social science papers in this special issuePearce Dessai and Barr in their article Reframing Environmental Social Science Research for Sustainable Water Management in a Changing Climate explore what they see to be a bias towards anthropocentric demandside management in current approaches to water management and climate change adaptation in the UK and how this is brought through into current conceptual and methodological approaches in the water industry in dealing with the individualised consumer They also identify how this creates a dichotomy in the ‘twin track’ mantra of demand and supply within current approaches to water management in the UK Following a strong history of social science research from Australia the UK and Europe they problematise this current framing of the location of adaptation and change ‘within the individual’ highlighting how this framing inadvertently reemphasizes the importance of developing more resilient infrastructure in the face of the ‘average consumer’ who it is uncertain whose consumption can be ‘controlled’ They overview the way that these problematic framings that is a “dystopian disaster frame and the results were viewed through a behaviour frame” are brought into the actual content of current government funded research in the UK and used to develop fairly inaccurate typologies and segmentations of customers which are then used to shape ‘interventions’ and ‘demand reduction strategies’ based on attitudes to the environment and climate change rather than actual reflections of water related practices and associated services provided by water and their relationship to actual water use consumption The authors propose that Classic Grounded Theory could be used as a potential approach to bridge the positivist and postpositivist divide that has previously been observed as existing in ‘social’ and ‘hard’ research on water resource management in the UK and may be a way of sprouting interventions related to water use from actual context of study that is patterns of actual water use rather than it being inferred from nonrelated theory that is attitudinal and economic theory They suggest that this should be attractive to funders of water efficiency and demand research and policy as “an intervention that grows from a substantive theory is likely to be much more useful and beneficial in the shortterm”Browne Medd and Anderson in their article Developing novel approaches to tracking domestic water demand under uncertainty—A reflection on the “up scaling” of social science approaches in the United Kingdom present an initial piece of work focused on developing methodologies for tracking actual water use practices It similarly advocates the use of alternative methodological perspectives to be developed to support the critical social sciences studies of water consumption and demand management in a way that address actual practices and habits associated with water use rather than approaches to the typologies of the domestic consumer that are shaped by psychological economic and environmental framings highlighted in the article by Pearce Dessai and Barr However rather than follow the more qualitative route as suggested by Pearce et al they advocate for playful and experimental use of quantitative methodologies to stretch out and up conceptual approaches to critical social science research namely practice theory and an idea of ‘distributed demand’ that have largely been conducted through qualitative approaches While also recognizing the limitations of current approaches to framings of the consumer they also recognise the limitations of critical social science in not developing methodological approaches that are at the same time critical of and useful to the current water resource management system They argue for linking studies of actual consumption as identified by Parker and Wilby with more qualitative and grounded research advocated by Pearce et al as well as scaling this qualitative research in such a way to identify changes at population levels to the drivers of consumption They outline potential strategies for tracking the drivers of demand which could be used as proxy measurements to identify change to water demand at a population level which could be then used to inform research and policy strategiesParker and Wilby in their article Quantifying household water demand A review of theory and practice in the UK provide a comprehensive overview of the current approaches to demand forecasting and prediction in the water industry in the UK largely exploring the use of household and other demographic variables as a method of assessing per capita consumption and potential changes related to a range of technological and other outcomes Through this review they highlight the paucity of research addressing the relationship between weather variables and actual consumption and highlight the flaws in current approaches that attempt to predict and forecast future household consumption related to weather and climate variability They use the Anglian Water Services ‘Golden 100’ data set to illustrate the significant practical and conceptual issues faced when mining household demand data for weather signals The errors that are carried through in these large data sets are highlighted as are the fact that these datasets were always intended for other applications not for exploring the relationship between demand and weather Nevertheless they have identified a range of potentially interesting demand and weather relationships at various levels of analysis—from stratification to linear regression analyses This reveals that there is often a nonlinear relationship between weather variables and demand profiles The practical and analytical learnings from this research could be used to inform approaches to water demand estimation and forecasting over the short daily to season and long term years to decadesIn his invited editorial Mujumdar notes that not even a small proportion of the large impact literature has reached into policy interventions and decision making in the developing world He attributes the lack of use of climate impact studies by water managers to large uncertainties and their longterm focus Nearterm decadal projections and the reduction of uncertainties could benefit water resources planning Mujumdar further highlights the challenge of adapting urban water systems in developing countries where demand is increasing

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