By: Qatium Experts
Contributor: Paul Fleming
Water professionals are intimately familiar with the real-time effects of climate change. You’ve witnessed how climate change already is amplifying, and will continue to amplify, the variability that is inherent to the water cycle. The water cycle has become increasingly erratic, creating a whipsawing effect — where droughts and floods may follow in quick succession.
We all recognize that historic management strategies are increasingly ill-suited to address this enhanced variability, as well as the shifting baselines. That’s why it’s essential for water utility professionals to re-cast and re-imagine how they execute their roles and responsibilities to reconfigure, operate and maintain water systems that are not only reliable, but resilient as well.
This call extends beyond your traditional scope of responsibility. It requires reaching across institutional silos, building resilience and re-examining your operational and planning practices in light of your resilience goals.
The good news is that you don’t have to take these steps alone. Paul Fleming, #QatiumExpert and water and climate tech advisor, served as the lead author for the recently released “Water Resilience Assessment Framework: Utility Guidance” (WRAF). The document provides a step-by-step approach for how utilities can integrate resilience into their planning, while providing examples of tools, methods and sample resilience indicators that utilities can consider in their resilience journey. And Qatium, sitting at the crossroads of digital innovation and expertise, will be with you every step of the way.
Following the lead of the WRAF, Qatium’s experts recommend three strategies you can use to best prepare for a changing climate:
1. Visualize your system(s)
2. Develop a resilience strategy
3. Test resilience actions
Let’s get started.
1. Visualize your system(s)
A common thread for water utilities is that you are rooted and anchored to a specific locale. This place-bound quality is one key differentiator for utilities with other sectors, as it binds you to the long-term resilience of a specific community and economy. Understanding the contexts in which a utility is embedded is essential to building resilience. A first step for your utility is to understand and assess the critical contexts that can hinder or hasten the pursuit of resilience, such geographic, ecological and regulatory contexts (see the WRAF for relevant contexts utilities should consider).
With an understanding of these varying contexts, you should start to visualize and articulate three key features of your utility’s system:
System boundary
There are several ways to consider a system boundary. There is the traditional hydrologic or basin boundary of a system, which delineates where a source of supply is derived from. But this is likely to be too limiting when considering what strategies to take to increase resilience. The previous exercise of considering varying contexts can be instrumental in helping to best depict your system boundary. For example, areas that are provided by your utility that are outside of your hydrologic boundary should definitely be considered within your system boundary. Ultimately, how a system boundary is defined will reflect some tradeoff between comprehensiveness and manageability, and should be viewed as an inherently flexible construct.
Identify water stresses, shocks and drivers
Having assessed the various contexts that affect utility management, and defined a system boundary within which to consider resilience, a utility should identify the water stresses, shocks and drivers that buffet its system. Using water availability, quality and access as a starting point to identify relevant stresses, shocks and drivers is a good first step. So for example, if a utility is particularly sensitive to turbidity due to inadequate treatment capacity, then an import shock could be intense rainfall events or long duration rainfall. It will be important to not be constrained by the biophysical and to also consider how stresses, shocks and drivers to socioeconomic and institutional components of a utility system can exacerbate or dampen stresses and shocks in other parts of the system.
A more recent pair of publications (Wasley and Kaatz, 2021; Wasley et al., 2020) describe how a utility can map climate exposure—and climate information needs—to critical business functions across the utility enterprise, which considers climate comprehensively, across all business functions, and not just those that are focused on water resource management.
2. Develop a resilience strategy
As your utility embarks upon developing a resilience strategy, you should assess what type of strategy is necessary given what you’ve uncovered as part of visualizing your system and the various contexts in which you operate. The WRAF identifies three types of resilience strategies:
Where a system is able to return to its original state and still function reliably after experiencing shock and/or stresses.
Whichever type of strategy is determined appropriate for your utility’s circumstance, the WRAF recommends that the strategy be guided by a set of resilience principles or characteristics that can serve as the basis for a set of resilience actions and tracking indicators.
Each utility may want to develop its own set of resilience characteristics, indicators and actions that reflects their and their communities value. The WRAF provides examples and/or categories for each. For characteristics, the WRAF identifies the following:
Robustness,
Redundancy,
Flexibility,
Integration,
Inclusiveness,
Justice and equity
Whatever resilience characteristics or attributes a utility adopts, they become the foundation for navigating a path forward towards resilience. They should be used to develop indicators to measure forward progress on achieving resilience, and determine what outcomes should be realized by specific actions a utility takes as part of its resilience strategy. Consulting WRAF will provide guidance on how to integrate resilience characteristics, indicators and actions into a cohesive overall strategy.
3. Validate and evaluate
With a resilience strategy in place, it’s now time to test the potential effectiveness of your strategy and its associated actions, and make any necessary course corrections.
A common method for testing the effectiveness of different actions is stress testing. Tools such as digital twins are extremely helpful for stress testing. Digital twins are easy-to-use replicas of your existing system, or different subcomponents, and can be used to quickly test your system under different conditions or scenarios before applying them in the real world. Depending upon the level of sophistication and complexity of the digital twin, you could use it to test how a resilience action (or actions) contributes to achieving a given resilience characteristics and/or indicator.
Invariably, this process of validation will reveal weaknesses in the overall strategy and/or weaknesses, oversights and/or shortcomings in the process. This provides an opportunity to step back and revisit each step of the process to examine where adjustments may be needed to course correct. This recursive component of any resilience strategy is a critical one and reinforces that this process of pursuing resilience requires ongoing vigilance and the ability to revisit and tweak the strategy and its component parts to reflect changing conditions.
Building resilience takes effort – but you’re not alone
In addition to digital twins, Qatium has developed another way to make the most of your data: a Software Development Kit (SDK), which “unlocks water.” The SDK allows users to customize and extend the Qatium platform to meet their specific needs and use cases, such as their unique risk management challenges and decision-making requirements. When water scarcity is an issue, developers can use the SDK to build out applications that are relevant for individual utilities or the market. The SDK is available for all of you – the experts in your local environment – to address the challenges your region faces by enabling the most innovative solutions to address those challenges.
In the big picture, climate change is introducing new sets of conditions that we’ve never seen before, and making existing extreme events more frequent. Building a resilient utility system that embraces uncertainty can help you be better prepared for what’s to come – and what already is.
Qatium experts
Paul Fleming advises startups and scaleups in the water and climate tech space and consults on water strategy and resilience through his firm WaterValue. Paul is one of many experts that we co-create with Qatium.
