Deciding for resilience: Utilizing water infrastructure investments to prepare for the future

Abstract

Governments are increasingly faced with climate change realities and have also committed themselves to international agreements with objectives to tackle long‐term problems such as becoming climate neutral by 2050. Governments, therefore, will need to carefully consider how to contribute to combatting climate change, when investing in their water infrastructure that is reaching an end‐of‐lifetime due to technical aging or changing functional requirements. Such investments offer crucial windows of opportunity to create more resilient water systems, because large budgets are involved and lifespans of infrastructure are long and co‐determine possible futures. Based on a literature review, this article develops key ways of how infrastructure operators could adopt a long‐term perspective and choose water management strategies that increase absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities. With these perspectives and strategies, this article sets out a basis to help governments prepare for the future when they invest in water infrastructure.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water Governance Science of Water > Water and Environmental Change Engineering Water > Planning Water

When, at what speed, and how? Resilient transformation of the Vesdre river basin (Belgium) following the 2021 floods

“…Crisis, such as floods, can help open such windows of opportunity for policy change. Other important windows of opportunity are a change of government after elections, and also the more 'planned' and foreseen moments of long-term investments in for example water infrastructure that can be utilized [21,22]. Timing can involve making an explicit connection between an acute shock (such as a flood) and the underlying issue of climate change.…”