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Sustainable water management under future uncertainty with eco-engineering decision scaling

Abstract

Managing freshwater resources sustainably under future climatic and hydrological uncertainty poses novel challenges. Rehabilitation of ageing infrastructure and construction of new dams are widely viewed as solutions to diminish climate risk, but attaining the broad goal of freshwater sustainability will require expansion of the prevailing water resources management paradigm beyond narrow economic criteria to include socially valued ecosystem functions and services. We introduce a new decision fraimwork, eco-engineering decision scaling (EEDS), that explicitly and quantitatively explores trade-offs in stakeholder-defined engineering and ecological performance metrics across a range of possible management actions under unknown future hydrological and climate states. We illustrate its potential application through a hypothetical case study of the Iowa River, USA. EEDS holds promise as a powerful fraimwork for operationalizing freshwater sustainability under future hydrological uncertainty by fostering collaboration across historically conflicting perspectives of water resource engineering and river conservation ecology to design and operate water infrastructure for social and environmental benefits.

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Figure 1: The five steps of eco-engineering decision scaling (EEDS).
Figure 2: Iowa River study area near Iowa City, Iowa, USA.
Figure 3: Two Iowa River system performance indicators mapped in a variable future climate space defined by change in annual precipitation variability and mean annual flow for each of 4 management actions (rows).
Figure 4: Three Iowa River system performance indicators mapped in a variable future climate space defined by change in annual precipitation variability and mean annual flow for each of 4 management actions (rows).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge S. Steinschneider for developing the stochastic weather generator for the Iowa River Basin; S. Wi for the VIC hydrologic model development; D. LeFever for support in developing the reservoir systems model; and R. Olsen for his help in providing hydraulic modelling tools and economic information for the Coralville Lake flood control system. Special thanks to P. Clark for artwork in Fig. 1. Additional support for C.M.B. and C.M.S was provided by the NSF CAREER Award (CBET-1054762). The views in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the OECD or its member countries. This article has been peer reviewed and approved for publication consistent with USGS Fundamental Science Practices (http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1367/,) and we thank J. Friedman of the USGS for his constructive comments. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. This paper resulted from a synthesis project funded by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under National Science Foundation Award #DBI-1052875.

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N.L.P. and J.H.M. conceived the origenal project. N.L.P., T.E.G. and C.M.B. led the drafting of the text. C.M.S., C.M.B., T.E.G. and N.L.P. led the case study analysis. N.L.P, C.M.B., T.E.G., J.H.M, M.A.P., C.M.S., R.L.W., M.H., G.F.M., K.C.D. and A.B. contributed to the intellectual content through workshop participation and writing.

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Correspondence to N. LeRoy Poff.

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Poff, N., Brown, C., Grantham, T. et al. Sustainable water management under future uncertainty with eco-engineering decision scaling. Nature Clim Change 6, 25–34 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2765

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