Reliable, resilient and sustainable water management: the Safe & SuRe approach

Abstract

Global threats such as climate change, population growth, and rapid urbanization pose a huge future challenge to water management, and, to ensure the ongoing reliability, resilience and sustainability of service provision, a paradigm shift is required. This paper presents an overarching framework that supports the development of strategies for reliable provision of services while explicitly addressing the need for greater resilience to emerging threats, leading to more sustainable solutions. The framework logically relates global threats, the water system (in its broadest sense), impacts on system performance, and social, economic, and environmental consequences. It identifies multiple opportunities for intervention, illustrating how mitigation, adaptation, coping, and learning each address different elements of the framework. This provides greater clarity to decision makers and will enable better informed choices to be made. The framework facilitates four types of analysis and evaluation to support the development of reliable, resilient, and sustainable solutions: “top‐down,” “bottom‐up,” “middle based,” and “circular” and provides a clear, visual representation of how/when each may be used. In particular, the potential benefits of a middle‐based analysis, which focuses on system failure modes and their impacts and enables the effects of unknown threats to be accounted for, are highlighted. The disparate themes of reliability, resilience and sustainability are also logically integrated and their relationships explored in terms of properties and performance. Although these latter two terms are often conflated in resilience and sustainability metrics, the argument is made in this work that the performance of a reliable, resilient, or sustainable system must be distinguished from the properties that enable this performance to be achieved.

The Vulnerability of Underground Water Resources to Bacteriological Indicators in Parts of Owerri West of Southeastern Nigeria

“…Resilience relates to performance during the design life but addresses performance during periods in which the required level of service is not met (i.e., when subject to threats). Resilience-based design aims to overcome failure and ensure that the system is safe to fail [39]. Faecal pollution of water may be derived from sewage effluents, defecation and/or shedding, livestock (cattle, sheep, etc.…”

A Systematic Review of Quantitative Resilience Measures for Water Infrastructure Systems

“…Since there has been extensive discussion on the resilience definitions, e.g., [21,[50][51][52], related issues are not repeated here. The resilience concepts and definitions for water infrastructure systems have been also discussed [14,[23][24][25] and suggested for target water systems: Hashimoto et al [29] defined resilience for water resources systems as the ability to quickly recover from a system failure. Butler et al [14] described a system's ability to minimize consequence and duration of the service failure under disrupted conditions.…”

“…The resilience concept has also gained greatly increasing prominence in designing and managing water infrastructure systems. Previous researchers, e.g., Moy et al [23], Wang and Blackmore [24], and Butler et al [14,25] have discussed the general concepts and definitions of resilience for water infrastructure systems. Several definitions of resilience have been also suggested for target water systems, as described in the following section.…”

Rainwater Harvesting and Social Networks: Visualising Interactions for Niche Governance, Resilience and Sustainability

“…The way in which water is provided and used can be regarded as a complex system, due to the interlinked and interactive nature of social, ecological and technical systems [3]. In order to become more sustainable and resilient, a range of scholars argue that the water 'system' must undergo a transition or paradigm shift or that radical change must be able to occur within the existing regime [4][5][6].…”

“…A range of organisations have acknowledged the significance of water resource, supply and sanitation resilience in the face of challenges or threats (such as climate change, population growth and urbanisation) and advocated developing long-term resilience through strengthening infrastructure and organisations [38][39][40]. As with most concepts, contestation over definitions and operationalisation of resilience exists, as does debate over suitable indicators and metrics through which to measure resilience, particularly within the water sector [4]. Continuation of that debate is beyond the scope of this paper, instead this paper focuses on the definitions of resilience and sustainability advocated in Butler et al [4,41] as part of the reliable, resilient and sustainable framework-or 'Safe and SuRe' framework for short (safe taken as representing reliable and SuRe representing sustainable and resilient, respectively).…”