Reliable, resilient and sustainable water management: the Safe & SuRe approach

TLDR

Global threats such as climate change, population growth, and rapid urbanization challenge water management, demanding a paradigm shift to ensure reliable, resilient, and sustainable service provision while distinguishing performance from the properties that enable it. The paper proposes an overarching framework to guide the development of strategies that ensure reliable service provision while enhancing resilience to emerging threats and promoting sustainability. The framework links global threats, water system performance, and social, economic, and environmental consequences, identifies mitigation, adaptation, coping, and learning interventions, and supports four analytical approaches—top‑down, bottom‑up, middle‑based, and circular—to integrate reliability, resilience, and sustainability. The framework offers decision makers clearer insight and better‑informed choices, particularly by highlighting the benefits of middle‑based analysis that addresses system failure modes and accounts for unknown threats.

Abstract

Abstract Global threats such as climate change, population growth, and rapid urbanization pose a huge future challenge to water management, and, to ensure the ongoing reliability, resilience and sustainability of service provision, a paradigm shift is required. This paper presents an overarching framework that supports the development of strategies for reliable provision of services while explicitly addressing the need for greater resilience to emerging threats, leading to more sustainable solutions. The framework logically relates global threats, the water system (in its broadest sense), impacts on system performance, and social, economic, and environmental consequences. It identifies multiple opportunities for intervention, illustrating how mitigation, adaptation, coping, and learning each address different elements of the framework. This provides greater clarity to decision makers and will enable better informed choices to be made. The framework facilitates four types of analysis and evaluation to support the development of reliable, resilient, and sustainable solutions: “top‐down,” “bottom‐up,” “middle based,” and “circular” and provides a clear, visual representation of how/when each may be used. In particular, the potential benefits of a middle‐based analysis, which focuses on system failure modes and their impacts and enables the effects of unknown threats to be accounted for, are highlighted. The disparate themes of reliability, resilience and sustainability are also logically integrated and their relationships explored in terms of properties and performance. Although these latter two terms are often conflated in resilience and sustainability metrics, the argument is made in this work that the performance of a reliable, resilient, or sustainable system must be distinguished from the properties that enable this performance to be achieved.