Exploring pathways for sustainable water management in river deltas in a changing environment

Marjolijn Haasnoot (), Hans Middelkoop, Astrid Offermans, Eelco Beek and Willem Deursen

Climatic Change, 2012, vol. 115, issue 3, 795-819

Abstract: Exploring adaptation pathways into an uncertain future can support decisionmaking in achieving sustainable water management in a changing environment. Our objective is to develop and test a method to identify such pathways by including dynamics from natural variability and the interaction between the water system and society. Present planning studies on long-term water management often use a few plausible futures for one or two projection years, ignoring the dynamic aspect of adaptation through the interaction between the water system and society. Our approach is to explore pathways using multiple realisations of transient scenarios with an Integrated Assessment Meta Model (IAMM). This paper presents the first application of the method using a hypothetical case study. The case study shows how to explore and evaluate adaptation pathways. With the pathways it is possible to identify opportunities, threats, timing and sequence of policy options, which can be used by policymakers to develop water management roadmaps into the future. By including the dynamics between the water system and society, the influence of uncertainties in both systems becomes clearer. The results show, among others, that climate variability rather than climate change appears to be important for taking decisions in water management. Copyright The Author(s) 2012

Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (41)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-012-0444-2 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:climat:v:115:y:2012:i:3:p:795-819

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-012-0444-2

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().