Reimagining the past - use of counterfactual trajectories in socio-hydrological modelling: the case of Chennai, India

摘要

The developing world is rapidly urbanizing. One of the challenges associated with this growth will be to supply water to growing cities of the developing world. Traditional planning tools fare poorly over 30-50 year time horizons because these systems are changing so rapidly. Models that hold land use, economic patterns, governance systems or technology static over a long planning horizon could result in inaccurate predictions leading to sub-optimal or paradoxical outcomes. Most models fail to account for adaptive responses by humans that in turn influence water resource availability, resulting in coevolution of the human-water system. Is a particular trajectory inevitable given a city's natural resource endowment, is the trajectory purely driven by policy or are there tipping points in the evolution of a city's growth that shift it from one trajectory onto another?