Macroeconomic Resilience: Making Water-Sensitive Strategic Choices for Growth

How can we plan for national economic resilience? In most countries, we lack effective, coherent, and credible strategies for economic resilience across sectors, regions, and levels of governance. Water resilience is one approach to negotiate tradeoffs and avoid traps, even under climatic, pandemic, and economic change and uncertainty.

Over the past decade, many institutions have developed powerful risk and economic assessment tools for investments in infrastructure, ecosystems, and communities that can guide us towards greater local-scale resilience. Recognizing the special roles and risks associated with the water resources embedded within those investments has been key to this progress. We know that resilience has a cost, and that different approaches to resilience will vary in efficacy, reach, coherence, and their resilience dividend. We have choices in how we pursue resilience.

However, these lessons have not scaled up to national levels, even though the global pandemic has provided both global and national stress testing for economic resilience comparable to other extreme threats such as ongoing climate change.

This session at the COP26 Water Pavilion explores how countries can develop national economic resilience strategies that reflect the insights gained from the practice and policy of water resilience, building upon insights from the Dasgupta review on the economics of biodiversity. Organized by the Water Resilience for Economic Resilience (WR4ER) partnership, we discuss the merits of and need for developing an evidence-based quantitative framework to guide economic planners and decision-makers as they manage social, climatic, economic, and pandemic change and uncertainty.