Sustainable water management under future uncertainty with eco-engineering decision scaling
By N. LeRoy Poff, Casey Brown, Theodore E. Grantham, John H. Matthews, Margaret A. Palmer, C. M. Spence, Robert L. Wilby, Marjolijn Haasnoot, G. Mendoza, Kathleen C. Dominique and 1 more. 2016
475 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Managing freshwater resources sustainably under future climatic and hydrological uncertainty poses novel challenges. Rehabilitation of ageing infrastructure and construction of new dams are widely viewed as solutions to diminish climate risk, but attaining the broad goal of freshwater sustainability will require expansion of the prevailing water resources management paradigm beyond narrow economic criteria to include socially valued ecosystem functions and services. We introduce a new decision framework, eco-engineering decision scaling (EEDS), that explicitly and quantitatively explores trade-offs in stake - holder-defined engineering and ecological performance metrics across a range of possible management actions under unknown future hydrological and climate states. We illustrate its potential application through a hypothetical case study of the Iowa River, USA. EEDS holds promise as a powerful framework for operationalizing freshwater sustainability under future hydrologi- cal uncertainty by fostering collaboration across historically conflicting perspectives of water resource engineering and river conservation ecology to design and operate water infrastructure for social and environmental benefits. evaluation a significant challenge 7,8 . These costs can be substantial, as evidenced by human displacement 5,9 , local species extinctions 10
Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Ocean Engineering, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44bda5d80a17ba01d3a69dca73b1c0958c199e77
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In Global and Planetary Change
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Linkages between flow regime, biota, and ecosystem processes: Implications for river restoration (2019, result): “Restoring flow regimes rather than events Scientifically informed flow designs may exist that maintain ecosystem integrity in regulated rivers (116, 117), but these have produced mixed results to date.”
- Beyond the natural flow regime? Broadening the hydro‐ecological foundation to meet environmental flows challenges in a non‐stationary world (2018, methodology): “Decision scaling (Brown, Ghile, Laverty, & Li, 2012) is one such approach that has been used in an e-flows context to quantitatively project how dams might be operated under climate uncertainty to meet stakeholder-defined engineering and ecological performance targets (Poff et al., 2016).”