AGU Abstracts Request: Mobilizing Water Resources to Operationalize Economic Resilience
Resilience as Macroeconomic Policy: Mobilizing Water Resources to Operationalize Adaptive Development in a Time of Global Change (SY045)
Convenors: AGWA, World Bank, IADB, University of Maryland College Park
Resilience is not an accident — it must be planned for and invested in, even by economic planners. Climate change poses unprecedented challenges, disrupting trade relationships, rendering supply chains brittle, stranding investments, and generating new socioeconomic inequities. Disciplines such as engineering and hydrology have been integrating resilience measures into their core practices, but resilience has not been fully embraced as a macroeconomic principle that can be operationalized despite warnings since the influential Stern Review. Economic planning in most cases inadequately integrates climate dynamics, and simplistic derisking is no longer sufficient. Instead, policymakers, companies, and economic planners need to articulate choices that can tolerate climate uncertainty and value qualities such as redundancy, flexibility, and robustness. For this session, we propose to show that water resources can move beyond being a hazard to a systemic solution for planning and implementation, embracing deep uncertainty and building coherence between sectors, investments, and administrative boundaries.