Background
Water provides multiple services including public supplies for drinking and sanitation, industrial processing, hydropower, irrigation and amenity, in addition to its intrinsic natural functions. Water resources, from the national scale to the local, are subject to diverse stresses affecting both quantity (including flooding and drought) and quality (including new chemical and biological contaminants and ‘cocktail’ mixtures). Spatially complex land use change and climate change drivers are combining to increase existing risks and leading to new emergent risks not yet on the radar of organisational responses (Brown, 2020).
The challenge therefore is to improve collective understanding of water resource systems in terms of changing stressors and to strengthen coordinated responses and combined risk ownership across the system to ameliorate negative outcomes. Greater clarity is needed on societal expectations for water and more co-ordinated and spatially targeted responses to reduce risks to acceptable levels and take advantage of synergistic opportunities. This requires further developments and refinements of existing regulatory instruments and policy-based incentives – especially through unrealised potential for increased use of nature-based solutions to deliver multiple benefits.
Aims/Objective
This project will develop a participatory systems-based template and associated stress-testing approach for Scotland’s water resources. The main objectives are to define the system at multiple levels (including from national scale to catchment/aquifer level), the key stakeholders involved and how their decisions interact, the changing land use and climate drivers acting on the system, and expected outcomes based on current knowledge.
Methods/Approach
The approach will build on recent advances in defining and mapping systemic risks, as applied to water and driven by changes in land use and climate. A bespoke systems mapping tool (based on causal loop analysis) will be developed drawing from participatory fora with key stakeholders to identify external drivers, system variables and indicators. The stress-testing component builds on an approach that was originally pioneered with stakeholder engagement through the National Ecosystem Assessment to test the qualitative robustness of different response options in a changing world (Brown et al., 2015). This proposal will extend this approach quantitatively, by pooling data from different data providers in Scotland and the UK and from recent research projects (UK CCCRA3, OpenClim, Assist, FABLE, PROWATER etc.). This will include both climate change and socioeconomic scenarios and baseline data. The systems approach will also allow the quality of data to be assessed (consistency, representativeness etc.) and categorised for further refinement.
To reference systems connections for key water-related issues (water quality; flooding; drought) we propose to use a source-pathways-receptors model. This will also be used to define the interaction of existing regulatory controls. To help categorise spatial and temporal variability across Scotland in terms of the resilience of the national resource we propose to further investigate use of catchment typologies as being explored for drinking water in a current Hydro Nation Scholar project (Vorstius et al., 2019).
The limited work conducted on this topic to-date has focussed on average long-term changes, but this gives only partial insights across the water sector. Hence, the stress-testing method will utilise new higher-resolution data (e.g. from UKCP18) to incorporate changes in year to year and seasonal variability, including systemic risks from changing frequency/magnitude of extreme events, changing spell lengths (dry/wet etc.), and compound events. Land use changes will be referenced against recent work on changing land capability for Scotland, socioeconomic drivers (e.g. food and energy security) and policy objectives (e.g. pathways to Net Zero; woodland expansion).
By referencing key system functions against the range of present and future stresses, the robustness of those functions can be evaluated, also including any co-ordinated interventions designed to improve the capacity or capability of the system, both in terms of supply and demand, but also geographically across the resource system as a whole.