Preventing Shocks and Stresses from becoming Crises: Water Resilience Assessment Framework

Climate change is projected to further intensify the global water cycle, including its variability and the severity of wet and dry events. Shocks and stresses, both predictable and unforeseen, affect the resilience of water systems and the stakeholders that rely on them. What happens when climate change breaks rules we've used to stay profitable, sustainable, and efficient? How can we ensure that our institutions and their operations continue to survive and thrive despite shocks and stresses?

The Water Resilience Assessment Framework (WRAF) is a high-level framework that seeks to prevent shocks and stresses from becoming crises. It aims to facilitate a shared understanding of water system resilience and allow practitioners to develop common measurable goals and outcomes for stakeholder and resilience planning. The WRAF guides users through a process of visualizing the system, developing a resilience strategy, testing the resilience strategy and evaluating the outcomes in order to build system-wide resilience. The WRAF makes resilience a predictable outcome in an unpredictable world, which is increasingly important as climate change continues to alter how we make water management decisions. This session will seek to explore the bounds of resilience thinking and seek input on how to continue to grow and foster resilience.

This COP26 session at the Water Pavilion introduces the framework and how it can be used to build resilience and support climate change adaptation goals. A panel of cross-sectoral experts will further elaborate on the gap that the WRAF fills and how they would use it in their own work. Concluding remarks will focus on the path forward and a call to action.