Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning
Water resources planning requires decision-making about infrastructure development under uncertainty in future regional climate conditions. However, uncertainty in climate change projections will evolve over the 100-year lifetime of a dam as new climate observations become available. Flexible strate...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Springer Science and Business Media LLC
2020
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128815 |
| _version_ | 1826206706828312576 |
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| author | Fletcher, Sarah Marie Lickley, Megan Jeramaz Strzepek, Kenneth |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Fletcher, Sarah Marie Lickley, Megan Jeramaz Strzepek, Kenneth |
| author_sort | Fletcher, Sarah Marie |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Water resources planning requires decision-making about infrastructure development under uncertainty in future regional climate conditions. However, uncertainty in climate change projections will evolve over the 100-year lifetime of a dam as new climate observations become available. Flexible strategies in which infrastructure is proactively designed to be changed in the future have the potential to meet water supply needs without expensive over-building. Evaluating tradeoffs between flexible and traditional static planning approaches requires extension of current paradigms for planning under climate change uncertainty which do not assess opportunities to reduce uncertainty in the future. We develop a new planning framework that assesses the potential to learn about regional climate change over time and therefore evaluates the appropriateness of flexible approaches today. We demonstrate it on a reservoir planning problem in Mombasa, Kenya. This approach identifies opportunities to reliably use incremental approaches, enabling adaptation investments to reach more vulnerable communities with fewer resources. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:37:19Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/128815 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T13:37:19Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1288152022-10-01T16:06:31Z Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning Fletcher, Sarah Marie Lickley, Megan Jeramaz Strzepek, Kenneth Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences Water resources planning requires decision-making about infrastructure development under uncertainty in future regional climate conditions. However, uncertainty in climate change projections will evolve over the 100-year lifetime of a dam as new climate observations become available. Flexible strategies in which infrastructure is proactively designed to be changed in the future have the potential to meet water supply needs without expensive over-building. Evaluating tradeoffs between flexible and traditional static planning approaches requires extension of current paradigms for planning under climate change uncertainty which do not assess opportunities to reduce uncertainty in the future. We develop a new planning framework that assesses the potential to learn about regional climate change over time and therefore evaluates the appropriateness of flexible approaches today. We demonstrate it on a reservoir planning problem in Mombasa, Kenya. This approach identifies opportunities to reliably use incremental approaches, enabling adaptation investments to reach more vulnerable communities with fewer resources. 2020-12-11T16:02:29Z 2020-12-11T16:02:29Z 2019-04 2018-08 2019-07-25T12:04:43Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 2041-1723 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128815 Fletcher, Sarah et al. "Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning." Nature Communications 10, 1 (April 2019): 1782 © 2019 The Author(s) en http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09677-x Nature Communications Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ application/pdf Springer Science and Business Media LLC Nature |
| spellingShingle | Fletcher, Sarah Marie Lickley, Megan Jeramaz Strzepek, Kenneth Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning |
| title | Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning |
| title_full | Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning |
| title_fullStr | Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning |
| title_full_unstemmed | Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning |
| title_short | Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning |
| title_sort | learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128815 |
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