Launching a new initiative: Water Resilience for Economic Resilience
Welcome!
Water Resilience for Economic Resilience is an initiative that began as a conversation on the eve of Europe’s Covid-19 shutdown in 2020. The germ of the idea came from Niels Vlaanderen in the Ministry for Infrastructure and Water in the Netherlands: Is there a way that can communicate to economists and economic planners that resilience, especially water-centric resilience, should be an essential part of how we ensure that countries can thrive and prosper in spite of rapid, uncertain climate change impacts? With close colleagues such as Cees van de Guchte, Diego Rodriguez, and Kathleen Dominique, we have tried to develop these concepts a bit more, until a day-long workshop last March in The Hague.
Our simple idea is both powerful and transformative. The discipline of economics has been essential for centuries in helping us make choices that—ideally—reduce poverty, grow wealth, and tell us what investments are most efficient and effective.
Though long seen as the dismal profession, economics has largely proven optimistic in terms of addressing climate change: if impacts are distant and uncertain, or options to reduce potential climate risks are hard to quantify, longstanding tools tell us to favor more optimized and streamlined approaches. Resilience has a cost, but with current economic frameworks the benefits of resilience are often unclear. Do assumptions to discount future climate impacts still make sense, when climate science suggests we may have centuries of additional climate change still ahead of us?
According to Josefina Maestu in the Spanish Ministry of Ecological Transitions, our economic planning needs to temper efficiency with resilience. We need both perspectives. Together.
Our sense is that these issues are extremely timely and sensible. They are necessary, and not simply in developing economies trying to negotiate tradeoffs between agriculture and energy. These ideas also need definition and evidence and, in time, guidelines, analytical tools, and clear frameworks. We are a diverse but small group, dedicated to ensuring that our investments and planning make the economic case for resilience. Please join us. Please spread the word. Please work with us.
John H. Matthews, PhD
Corvallis, Oregon, USA
How to Get Involved
1. Meet with us! We are planning a live / virtual meeting in late August on the margins of Stockholm World Water Week. We should have a time and place (and virtual connections) specific soon, but we are currently aiming for the afternoon CET of Saturday, 27 August. We plan additional meetings, including at an OECD event in September, Cairo Water Week in October, COP27 in November, and the UN Water conference in New York in March.
2. Join our LinkedIn group. We’ll have our most current discussions and updates there.
3. Engage with us on Twitter, both via @wr4er and #wr4er.
4. Share these newsletters with relevant colleagues. You can sign up at wr4er.org, which will eventually become a developed site.
5. Help us find the best venues for these messages. Our intuition is that we need to be talking with ministries of finance, economics, and economic development planners. Economists and planners who engage on DRR, basic service grids (e.g., water and electrical utilities), and the integration of natural capital into investment seem like natural allies. Additional conferences than those listed above may be relevant — help us find them! Professional societies may be critical to this work.
6. Lastly, help us craft and build the messages, lessons, and evidence together. Much has already emerged, such as the March 2022 lesson from the IPCC WG2 that “water-based adaptation” should be at the core of global resilience efforts. But we also need clear cases. Individuals within this group are already committing to specific national and regional examples. We have faith in proximity with each other, we can deduce broader lessons and strategies. Please consider developing these with us.