Reliable, resilient and sustainable water management:udthe Safe SuRe approach

摘要

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,udresilience 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 toudemerging 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 opportunitiesudfor intervention, illustrating how mitigation, adaptation, coping, and learning each address different elements of the framework. This provides greater clarity to decisionudmakers and will enable better informed choices to be made. The framework facilitates four types of analysis and evaluation to support the development of reliable,udresilient, and sustainable solutions: “top-down,” “bottom-up,” “middle based,” and “circular” and provides a clear, visual representation of how/when each may be used.udIn particular, the potential benefits of a middle-based analysis, which focuses on systemudfailure modes and their impacts and enables the effects of unknown threats to beudaccounted 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.