Strategic Investment Pathways for resilient water systems

Casey Brown, Fred Boltz and Kathleen Dominique

No 202, OECD Environment Working Papers from OECD Publishing

Abstract: Water infrastructure investments are typically capital-intensive and long-lived, involving significant costs and benefits. Their performance over operational lifetimes is highly dependent on the vagaries of the hydrological cycle and subject to the risks and uncertainties associated with climate change. The challenge is to make the best use of scarce financial resources to deliver desired water services in the context of these complicating factors. Ideally, planning for water-related investments should be robust to known hazards and flexible to adapt to an uncertain future. This paper presents a conceptual and analytical framework to sequence water-related investments along “Strategic Investment Pathways”. This approach considers a range of diverse investments over multiple scenarios and evaluates options relative to stakeholder-defined goals. It explicitly considers key dynamic processes, interdependencies and feedbacks within the water system. The aim is to inform investment decisions that contribute to water system resilience through effective and adaptive management over time.

Keywords: flood protection; infrastructure finance; investment; irrigation; sanitation; wastewater; water security; water supply (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H41 H54 L95 L98 Q25 Q53 Q54 Q58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-11-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr and nep-env
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1787/9afacd7f-en (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oec:envaaa:202-en

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in OECD Environment Working Papers from OECD Publishing Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().