Water Utilities: Moving from Risk to Resilience
Written by John Matthews, Executive Director, AGWA and Paul Fleming, President, WaterValue.
The last two decades have seen powerful and often surprising shocks and stresses that have revealed endemic and emerging risks in our political, social, ecological, and infrastructure systems. While we need to continue to assess and catalog these risks to understand what we need to manage or avoid, a primary challenge ahead of us is to chart pathways of resilience that reflect what we value and what we want to achieve.
How do we do this, for instance, for our communities? We believe that utilities are an essential part of the answer, leveraging water for equity, growth, and positive change throughout communities. But as new challenges have arisen, we also need to find new types of solutions.
Today, we are launching a new guidance for public and private utilities called WRAF (“the RAF”): the Water Resilience Assessment Framework.
WRAF aims to gather some of the most critical insights about resilience and adaptation from the past twenty years in ways that can be implemented, scaled, and leveraged to drive decades of transformative impact.
Starting early during the Covid lockdown, a small but global team of water resilience practitioners, researchers, and planners began meeting to explore how to enable institutions and individuals to develop a structured approach to identifying major threats and opportunities. We began with some boundaries: in order to be successful for water utilities, we needed to focus on systems (ecological, infrastructure, social); we needed to understand how these systems might be experiencing change; and we needed to measure resilience.
The first fruit of that work came in 2022, when we published a short guidance with a common agenda and program for utilities, the private sector, and basin managers. The short but core guide Water Resilience Assessment Framework (WRAF) effectively shows why simply looking at a handful of climatic or other environmental variables is insufficient to cope with the large changes many regions are already experiencing — much less the bigger changes to come.
Today, we are launching an elaboration of the core WRAF guide, a detailed guidance document for how to conceptualize and apply a water resilience framework in a water utility context. We hope this guide will stimulate discussion, contribute to and/or transform how resilience is framed, prioritized and measured, and ultimately foster greater resilience amongst water utilities and the communities they serve.
Give WRAF for Utilities a read, give us a call, and let’s talk about exploring implementation.
This guidance was produced in partnership between AGWA, Water Value, the CEO Water Mandate and the Pacific Institute.
