Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning
Name
s41467-019-09677-x.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.31 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
60fa6bf1c3c826e2f5e2d4dcf0112e9c
Author(s)
Fletcher, Sarah Marie
Lickley, Megan Jeramaz
Strzepek, Kenneth
Date Issued
April 2019
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Fletcher, Sarah et al. "Learning about climate change uncertainty enables flexible water infrastructure planning." Nature Communications 10, 1 (April 2019): 1782 © 2019 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Water resources planning requires decision-making about infrastructure development under uncertainty in future regional climate conditions. However, uncertainty in climate change projections will evolve over the 100-year lifetime of a dam as new climate observations become available. Flexible strategies in which infrastructure is proactively designed to be changed in the future have the potential to meet water supply needs without expensive over-building. Evaluating tradeoffs between flexible and traditional static planning approaches requires extension of current paradigms for planning under climate change uncertainty which do not assess opportunities to reduce uncertainty in the future. We develop a new planning framework that assesses the potential to learn about regional climate change over time and therefore evaluates the appropriateness of flexible approaches today. We demonstrate it on a reservoir planning problem in Mombasa, Kenya. This approach identifies opportunities to reliably use incremental approaches, enabling adaptation investments to reach more vulnerable communities with fewer resources.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09677-x
