Identifying Actionable Compromises: Navigating Multi‐City Robustness Conflicts to Discover Cooperative Safe Operating Spaces for Regional Water Supply Portfolios

Abstract

Regional cooperation among water utilities can improve the robustness of urban water supply systems to challenging and deeply uncertain futures. Through coordination mechanisms such as water transfers and regional demand management, water utilities can improve the efficiency of resource allocation and delay the need for new infrastructure investments. Though cooperation provides utilities with the potential for reduced cost strategies for improving the reliability of their services, two important challenges are worthy of careful consideration. First, regional utilities often have to navigate robustness conflicts stemming from potential asymmetries in their risk exposure, demand dynamics, and the availability of supply resources. Second, successful implementation of candidate compromise water portfolios requires that cooperating utilities understand their operational tolerances to deviations from the recommended regional actions (“imperfect implementation”). This study contributes a framework for identifying compromises across regional robustness conflicts and quantifying tolerances to implementation uncertainties. The framework is demonstrated on a system of four interdependent but institutionally independent water utilities in the Research Triangle region of North Carolina that are confronting robustness conflicts given asymmetries in their vulnerabilities to growing demands and hydroclimatic uncertainties. Our findings highlight that seemingly balanced compromise management strategies can yield significant and potentially surprising unintended consequences that could degrade regional cooperation. Moreover, asymmetries in regional robustness can be amplified with modest deviations from their agreed upon actions. Results of this analysis are broadly applicable to water supply regionalization as a global challenge and provide insights for discovering robust compromises and safe operating spaces for multi‐actor water supply systems.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals Requires Transdisciplinary Innovation at the Local Scale

“…49 Therefore, the robust trade-offs among competing priorities also require effective coupling of participatory with novel computational approaches that can simulate and reproduce the interactions of conflicting, interconnected priorities in highly complex socio-ecological systems. 50 Past research has studied complex trade-offs through a range of computational techniques, such as network analysis, 51 dynamic modeling, 4 and exploratory modeling. 52 These and other similar techniques need to be further used and tested within the SDGs framework to enhance robust localscale decision making.…”

“…The exploratory approach can enable the investigation of transient future scenarios that are sampled systematically across uncertainties. 50,55 Coping with uncertainties also requires the evaluation and monitoring of change unfolding over time, offering cues to stakeholders about when the plan might diverge from the targets, and anticipating actions to respond to potential divergences. Such an adaptive approach has been widely discussed and implemented in the context of backcasting, experimenting, and monitoring to ensure that all necessary measures are taken for achieving long-term goals.…”

Defining Robustness, Vulnerabilities, and Consequential Scenarios for Diverse Stakeholder Interests in Institutionally Complex River Basins

“…These concerns are especially relevant for water resources systems supporting demands across multiple sectors, such as agriculture, manufacturing, power generation, and recreation (Kasprzyk et al, 2016). Relatively few recent studies have focused on clarifying the implications of multistakeholder trade‐offs in robustness (Gold et al, 2019; Herman et al, 2014; Trindade et al, 2017) to actively reduce inadvertent consequences for particular actors. Moreover, these studies are limited in their focus on a single sector (i.e., water supply) and only four significant actors.…”

Evaluating participatory modelling methods for co-creating pathways to sustainability

“…At the highest level, the framework evaluates suitability based on how the method can address the practical requirements of a given participatory modelling situation ( Figure 1). We defined practical requirements in relation to the features of the context (e.g., sustainable agriculture in a regional area) and across the steps in developing pathways (e.g., discovering future scenarios (17), assessing system vulnerabilities (18); see Figure 7 in Methods and Table S1 in Supplementary Materials for the steps' overview). Context is important since case studies are not homogenous and have various characteristics, requiring different methods.…”

“…Decision science has used the concept of pathways in a different way and as sequences of actions and interventions to realise the transformational change in the face of deep uncertainty and complexity of coupled human-natural systems (18). The term deep uncertainty here recognises that future projections, system boundary, model structure, and other aspects may not be known (or agreed among stakeholders) and may always remain unknown (29).…”