The AGWA Guide to Sustainable Water Resources Management: Moving Beyond No Regrets Adaptation

The AGWA Guide is meant to serve as a resource for individuals and institutions who are interested in learning about how to mainstream climate adaptation into water resources management. We believe this builds explicitly on our previous AGWA publication Beyond Downscaling: A Bottom-Up Approach to Climate Adaptation for Water Resources Management. However, Beyond Downscaling is a synthetic overview of bottom-up approaches to climate adaptation and risk assessment in particular, while the AGWA Guide is intended to serve as more of a self-exploration guide to the broader literature. The AGWA Guide should provide more detailed descriptions of current thinking and implementation on these approaches.

 

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How do we analyze vulnerability in a way to sustain stakeholder-driven implementation?

 

In this video, Dr. Eugene Stakhiv (US Army Corps of Engineers, retired), explores the History of Climatic Changes.

We know that in the past, water level in the Great Lakes changed dramatically +/-10 meters. So how did this happen before CO2? Why do ice ages occur? Why has the Gulf Stream collapsed? These, and other questions are addressed by Dr. Stakhiv.

1.1. Adapting to Existing (and Evolving) Climate Variability.


Climate variability refers to the severity and frequency of droughts, floods, and other extreme events, as well as the amount of seasonal variation. Climate variability is itself shifting globally now in response to climate change, so we must both adjust to existing climate variability as well as future changes in variability.

Large climate “engines” such as ENSO (the El Niño Southern Oscillation), the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation are themselves changing, which alters other aspects of climate variability. Unfortunately, our projections for future trends are often very limited and incomplete, which makes planning, resource management, development strategy, and infrastructure design/operations more challenging, especially in the developing world.

•Valdez, Juan, Kenneth Strzepek, and Guillermo Mendoza. “Climate Variability and Extremes.” Theme discussions. Recorded 2013. Washington DC: The World Bank. [video]•Droogers, Peter (FutureWater). “Evapotransporation.” Theme discussions. Recorded 2009. Washington DC: The World Bank. [video]

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