Water in a Changing Climate: Reducing Risks, Leveraging Opportunities and Enhancing Resilience

Resilience is a journey, not a destination.

Climate change impacts almost every critical system upon which we depend – such as water, energy and food. It puts security at risk, damages infrastructure, adversely impacts human health and biodiversity, and influences regional and global economies.

For utilities, governments and corporations to effectively enhance their overall resilience to climate change, they can no longer look to the past for solutions. Organizations need to prepare and plan for all risks — including risks that may impact organizational ability to maintain business continuity and remain true stewards in a changing climate — and integrate consideration of those risks into decision-making.

Due to the cascading nature of climate-related risks and their ability to affect multiple systems concurrently, decision-making must take a systems approach.  

Strategies to adapt and enhance resilience to climate change should be robust, flexible and able to respond to a wide range of futures. They should be crafted in a holistic, transparent and inclusive way. Frameworks and processes to support organizations in addressing climate change must also be adaptive, and organizations must realize that climate resilience work will require constant monitoring, evaluation and continued action to understand its effectiveness and equitability.

With this in mind, and in observation of World Water Day 2022, WSP USA partnered with the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA) to develop a new whitepaper that combines two frameworks to illustrate how organizations can more significantly enhance climate and water resilience:

• The Business Function Mapping Framework, co-designed, tested, and iterated upon over three years with nine U.S.-based water utilities, and
• The Water Resilience Assessment Framework, designed to layer atop existing approaches to facilitate a shared understanding of water system resilience.

These frameworks can help organizations facilitate much-needed discussions around climate change impacts and develop an integrated and collaborative strategy. When organizations utilize these frameworks, they begin the journey to mainstream climate change considerations into organizational decision-making with the goal of enhancing their resilience to known and unknown climate-related shocks and stresses.

Download the whitepaper to learn how these two frameworks, if used together, can guide organizations along their climate-resilience journey.

Click here to download the whitepaper, “Water in a changing climate: Reducing risks, leveraging opportunities and enhancing resilience.”

Kimberly Grubert is a co-author of the whitepaper on behalf of WSP.

[To subscribe to Insights, contact the editorial staff at [email protected].]