Decision Analytic Approach to Resolving Divergent Climate Assumptions in Water Resources Planning

Spence, Caitlin; Brown, Casey

doi:10.1061/(asce)wr.1943-5452.0000939

Cited by 8 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…There is a need for further investigations to integrate the outcome of our study into a decision making framework. To amend and augment the GCM projections, a bottom-up approach is also needed to link the possible changes in a natural hazard to the local and regional policies (Whateley et al 2016, Spence and Brown 2018. The importance of incorporating climate change impacts on infrastructure has been acknowledged by the California State Legislature as an emerging problem through Assembly Bill No.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in the exposure of California’s levee-protected critical infrastructure to flooding hazard in a warming climate

Mallakpour

Sadegh

AghaKouchak

2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

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Levee systems are an important part of California's water infrastructure, engineered to provide resilience against flooding and reduce flood losses. The growth in California is partly associated with costly infrastructure developments that led to population expansion in the levee protected areas. Therefore, potential changes in the flood hazard could have significant socioeconomic consequences over levee protected areas, especially in the face of a changing climate. In this study, we examine the possible impacts of a warming climate on flood hazard over levee protected land in California. We use gridded maximum daily runoff from global circulation models (GCMs) that represent a wide range of variability among the climate projections, and are recommended by the California's Fourth Climate Change Assessment Report, to investigate possible climate-induced changes. We also quantify the exposure of several critical infrastructure protected by the levee systems (e.g. roads, electric power transmission lines, natural gas pipelines, petroleum pipelines, and railroads) to flooding. Our results provide a detailed picture of change in flood risk for different levees and the potential societal consequences (e.g. exposure of people and critical infrastructure). Levee systems in the northern part of the Central Valley and coastal counties of Southern California are likely to observe the highest increase in flood hazard relative to the past. The most evident change is projected for the northern region of the Central Valley, including Butte, Glenn, Yuba, Sutter, Sacramento, and San Joaquin counties. In the leveed regions of these counties, based on the model simulations of the future, the historical 100-year runoff can potentially increase up to threefold under RCP8.5. We argue that levee operation and maintenance along with emergency preparation plans should take into account the changes in frequencies and intensities of flood hazard in a changing climate to ensure safety of levee systems and their protected infrastructure.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Changes in the exposure of California’s levee-protected critical infrastructure to flooding hazard in a warming climate

Mallakpour

Sadegh

AghaKouchak

2020

Environ. Res. Lett.

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“…Finally, robustness analyses not only use sensitivity analysis to determine to which uncertainties users are most sensitive, and under what conditions they fail, but also to rank users or management plans by their “robustness” across the possible future worlds investigated. Many definitions have been proposed to define how robust users are to these changes, and it has been noted that different definitions result in different conclusions about what plans or users are most robust (Giuliani & Castelletti, 2016; Herman et al., 2015; McPhail et al., 2018; Spence & Brown, 2018). This study is concerned with a slightly different question of whether or not the ranking of user robustness under a single metric is consistent across alternative experimental designs.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this study, we explore how vulnerability assessments performed over competing hypotheses of how future hydrology might evolve dictate which uncertainties are found to most control water shortages for different users in an institutionally complex, multiactor system, and subsequently, which users are found to be most robust. Several studies have compared how robustness ranks of alternative management strategies or multiple water users (i.e., policies and objectives) differ under alternative definitions of robustness (Herman et al, 2015;Giuliani & Castelletti, 2016;Spence & Brown, 2018;McPhail et al, 2018;Hadjimichael, Quinn, Wilson, et al, 2020), or under alternative assumptions about the range and joint distribution of uncertain factors (i.e., the experimental design) (Moody & Brown, 2013;Taner et al, 2019;Reis & Shortridge, 2019). Yet none of these studies has explored if and how the importance of uncertain factors differs under alternative experimental designs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can Exploratory Modeling of Water Scarcity Vulnerabilities and Robustness Be Scenario Neutral?

2020

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“…Finally, robustness analyses not only use sensitivity analysis to determine to which uncertainties users are most sensitive, and under what conditions they fail, but also to rank users or management plans by their "robustness" across the possible future worlds investigated. Many definitions have been proposed to define how robust users are to these changes, and it has been noted that different definitions result in different conclusions about what plans or users are most robust (Giuliani & Castelletti, 2016;Herman et al, 2015;McPhail et al, 2018;Spence & Brown, 2018). This study is concerned with a slightly different question of whether or not the ranking of user robustness under a single metric is consistent across alternative experimental designs.…”

Section: Robustness Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this study, we explore how vulnerability assessments performed over competing hypotheses of how future hydrology might evolve dictate which uncertainties are found to most control water shortages for different users in an institutionally complex, multiactor system and, subsequently, which users are found to be most robust. Several studies have compared how robustness ranks of alternative management strategies or multiple water users (i.e., policies and objectives) differ under alternative definitions of robustness (Hadjimichael, Quinn, Wilson, et al, 2020;Herman et al, 2015;Giuliani & Castelletti, 2016;McPhail et al, 2018;Spence & Brown, 2018) or under alternative assumptions about the range and joint distribution of uncertain factors (i.e., the experimental design) (Moody & Brown, 2013;Reis & Shortridge, 2019;Taner et al, 2019). Yet none of these studies has explored if and how the importance of uncertain factors differs under alternative experimental designs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can exploratory modeling of water scarcity vulnerabilities and robustness be scenario neutral?

Quinn

Hadjimichael

Reed

2020

Preprint

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Planning under deep uncertainty, when probabilistic characterizations of the future are unknown, is a major challenge in water resources management. Many planning frameworks advocate for "scenario-neutral" analyses in which alternative policies are evaluated over plausible future scenarios with no assessment of their likelihoods. Instead, these frameworks use sensitivity analysis to discover which uncertain factors have the greatest influence on performance. This knowledge can be used to design monitoring programs and adaptive policies that respond to changes in the critical uncertainties. However, scenario-neutral analyses make implicit assumptions about the range and independence of the uncertain factors that may not be consistent with the coupled human-hydrologic processes influencing the system. These assumptions could influence which factors are found to be most important and which policies are most robust, belying their neutrality; assuming uniformity and independence could have decision-relevant implications. This study illustrates these implications using a multistakeholder planning problem within the Colorado River Basin, where hundreds of rights holders vie for the river's limited water under the law of prior appropriation. Variance-based sensitivity analyses are performed to assess users' vulnerabilities to changing hydrologic conditions using four experimental designs: (1) scenario-neutral samples of hydrologic factors, centered on recent historical conditions, (2) scenarios informed by climate projections, (3) scenarios informed by paleohydrologic reconstructions, and (4) scenario-neutral samples of hydrologic factors spanning all previous experimental designs. Differences in sensitivities and user robustness rankings across the experiments illustrate the challenges of inferring the most consequential drivers of vulnerabilities to design effective monitoring programs and robust management policies.Plain Language Summary How we should best manage our water resources depends on future water supply and demand, both of which are changing in uncertain ways as a consequence of climate change, population growth, and sectoral change. This makes it challenging to decide between alternative management plans that may be most favorable under different conditions. Given this uncertainty, many planning frameworks advocate for implementing "robust" management plans that perform reasonably well over a wide range of conditions. These plans can then be modified adaptively to cater to particular climate and socioeconomic conditions as our uncertainty about the future is reduced. Unfortunately, we find that the determination of which plan is most robust, and what conditions should trigger adaptation, is an additional challenge. In assessing the vulnerabilities of hundreds of water users in the Upper Colorado River Basin to different possible drought conditions, we find different users to be robust depending on which scenarios are considered. The sensitivities of these users' water shortages to different climate conditio...

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Decision Analytic Approach to Resolving Divergent Climate Assumptions in Water Resources Planning

Cited by 8 publications

References 42 publications

Changes in the exposure of California’s levee-protected critical infrastructure to flooding hazard in a warming climate

Changes in the exposure of California’s levee-protected critical infrastructure to flooding hazard in a warming climate

Can Exploratory Modeling of Water Scarcity Vulnerabilities and Robustness Be Scenario Neutral?

Can exploratory modeling of water scarcity vulnerabilities and robustness be scenario neutral?

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