Science Informed Policies for Managing Water

Abstract

Water resource management policies impact how water supplies are protected, collected, stored, treated, distributed, and allocated among multiple users and purposes. Water resource policies influence the decisions made regarding the siting, design, and operation of infrastructure needed to achieve the underlying goals of these policies. Water management policies vary by region depending on particular hydrologic, economic, environmental, and social conditions, but in all cases they will have multiple impacts affecting these conditions. Science can provide estimates of various economic, ecologic, environmental, and even social impacts of alternative policies, impacts that determine how effective any particular policy may be. These impact estimates can be used to compare and evaluate alternative policies in the search for identifying the best ones to implement. Among all scientists providing inputs to policy making processes are analysts who develop and apply models that provide these estimated impacts and, possibly, their probabilities of occurrence. However, just producing them is not a guarantee that they will be considered by policy makers. This paper reviews various aspects of the science-policy interface and factors that can influence what information policy makers need from scientists. This paper suggests some ways scientists and analysts can contribute to and inform those making water management policy decisions. Brief descriptions of some water management policy making examples illustrate some successes and failures of science informing and influencing policy.

Water for Tomorrow: A Living Lab on the Creation of the Science-Policy-Stakeholder Interface

“…The benefit was that we (as a group) were able to promote and support more decentralized water responsibilities aiming for results-based actions-an established good practice to overcome complex administrative and coordination impediments [63,64]. A prerequisite for this is to have a proper level of data and accessible and transparent information to support decisions for improved management [6].…”

“…Another element that arose in this stage was the need for more science informed policies for integrated water-agricultural management, able to cope with the future challenges [6,69]. Thus, the active and ongoing cooperation of knowledge institutions (universities, research centers) with the General Water Directorate and the relevant Ministries must be established (e.g., the Agricultural University of Athens is already an official advisor of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development).…”

“…These challenges significantly affect several sectors such as energy, fuels, industry, agriculture, international relations and trade, economy and resources, including water, human and natural capital [3][4][5]. The water management sector has to cope with these challenges (by supporting hydropower and agricultural production), overcoming any existing issues of infrastructure, water scarcity, water quality deterioration, effects of climate change, including extreme phenomena and mismanagement in human, economic and institutional terms [6,7].…”

“…The project Water For Tomorrow focused on Thessaly, a Greek rural Basin District (BD) facing, historically, several environmental and management problems and brought together for the first time a diverse multi-stakeholder group (living lab) aiming to improve current water management. This research incorporated the aforementioned lessons from the literature: involving key stakeholders on a long-term basis, ensuring a multi-level cooperation to co-develop holistic solutions [6,24], cultivating the necessary capacity and culture to support them [25] and avoiding thus potential conflicts [26]. These characteristics of the project, together with its length (19 months for workshops, 24 months including the design) allowed the building of relations based on trust, understanding, learning from each other and developing solid and integrated policy recommendations addressing all management levels.…”

Screening for nonstationary analysis

“…If this was possible, then adaptation planning to threats and opportunities would become a less complex challenge and the well-known and established systems analysis approaches described in Maass et al (1962), Major (1969), Loucks & van Beek (2017), and others could be appliedsome with proven success (Brown et al, 2015). Of course, as recently pointed out by Loucks (2021), there remain significant challenges in inserting the results of sophisticated water resources analyses into management policies.…”