Co‐Producing Interdisciplinary Knowledge and Action for Sustainable Water Governance: Lessons from the Development of a Water Resources Decision Support System in Pernambuco, Brazil

Abstract

One of the most pressing global challenges for sustainable development is freshwater management. Sustainable water governance requires interdisciplinary knowledge about environmental and social processes as well as participatory strategies that bring scientists, managers, policymakers, and other stakeholders together to cooperatively produce knowledge and solutions, promote social learning, and build enduring institutional capacity. Cooperative production of knowledge and action is designed to enhance the likelihood that the findings, models, simulations, and decision support tools developed are scientifically credible, solutions‐oriented, and relevant to management needs and stakeholders' perspectives. To explore how interdisciplinary science and sustainable water management can be co‐developed in practice, the experiences of an international collaboration are drawn on to improve local capacity to manage existing and future water resources efficiently, sustainably, and equitably in the State of Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil. Systems are developed to model and simulate rainfall, reservoir management, and flood forecasting that allow users to create, save, and compare future scenarios. A web‐enabled decision support system is also designed to integrate models to inform water management and climate adaptation. The challenges and lessons learned from this project, the transferability of this approach, and strategies for evaluating the impacts on management decisions and sustainability outcomes are discussed.

Modeling of an Extreme Flooding Event in the Amazon Basin Using the WRF-Hydro Model

“…[5] simulates typical 24-hour storm events, providing a reference for model application. In Brazil, the works of [11], [12] and [6] applied the WRF-Hydro model in Brazilian watersheds.…”

Advances and challenges in the water sciences in Brazil: a community synthesis of the XXIII Brazilian Water Resources Symposium

“…Part of the contributions focused on large scale systems and water supply reservoirs in the northeast region. White et al (2018) presented lessons from the development of a decisionmaking system of water management for the Pernambuco state, including reservoir operation, flood forecast, and scenario analyses on a web system. Gomes et al (2019a) showed the optimization of Cruzeta water supply reservoir in Piancó-Piranhas-Açu rivers and how the operational rules can decrease the failure rate of priority water demands.…”

Socio-technical scales in socio-environmental modeling: Managing a system-of-systems modeling approach

“…Discrepancies in the treatment of scale can be addressed firstly by developing a shared understanding of the system(s) being analyzed through a holistic interdisciplinary process ( Thompson, 2009 ; White et al, 2019 ). There is increasing recognition that holistic approaches are necessary to enable an integrated assessment of scale issues in socio-environmental (social-ecological) systems ( Schlüter et al, 2019a , 2019b ; Hoekstra et al, 2014 ).…”

“…Central to this interdisciplinary lens is making concrete the multidimensional nature of scale issues and the interplay among these. Here, the term “interdisciplinary” is favored over trans- or multi-disciplinary as the focus is on the “blending” of disciplinary knowledge ( White et al, 2019 ).…”