Rethinking Water Management from an Engineering Perspective

An integrated approach to water use and protection, which accounts explicitly for trade-offs between human and environmental needs and services, is required to achieve sustainable development. This creates intricate links between three systems—human, technical, and environmental—coupled in a dynamic system-of-systems with component interactions and feedbacks. However, governance systems are often ill-equipped to handle this complexity, which is exacerbated by rising demand, growing infrastructure interdependences, environmental challenges, continued urbanization, climate variability and natural disasters. This highlights a major challenge that society faces—the need to take a holistic approach to water environment management, while accounting for the natural capital within the system. This talk will introduce a systems water management framework that takes into account technical components (infrastructure) that interact with each other and the environment (water and land), as well as multiple stakeholders that act in the system across different management scales including (at least) national, catchment and local, and which hold different perspectives on and priorities for the system. The framework can be used to define the components of the system, relationships between them, and a shared meta-model that integrates these components. This enables the complexity to be communicated to, and understood by the stakeholders, so that they can develop a shared purpose and collective strategy for integrated water management, and engage in plan designs for improved water system operation.