Adaptation of water resources management to climate change

Until recently, there has been little open discussion on these types of risks. Public involvementin the decision-making process on water issues has been minimal. Water professionals have usuallymade decisions about key security and safety issues along technical lines and using “professionalnorms”. For example, dams and reservoirs were often designed to withstand a 50-year flood ordrought. But, there was little economic or social justification for why such an event was includedin the design criteria. Other decisions about risk were made as a result of a political bargainingprocess among different water management agencies or private entities.“FOR WATER PROFESSIONALS, CLIMATE CHANGE IS A NEWSOURCE OF UNCERTAINTY.”Beyond risk lies uncertainty. While risk can be quantified, uncertainty cannot 12 . Uncertaintyapplies to situations in which the world is not well-charted; it relates to questions of how to dealwith unprecedented events or situations. In such cases, past observations offer little guidance foruncertain futures. For water professionals, climate change is a new source of uncertainty. Thecurrent uncertainty about trends and changes in specific regions and basins requires managementapproaches that incorporate a higher degree of flexibility. This can be done, for example, throughcreating “buffers” based on (artificial) groundwater recharge, reforesting catchments to retardrunoff, or restoring wetlands to store floodwaters.While no approach can make the challenges of uncertainty go away, reducing the level ofuncertainty and tailoring strategies to that uncertainty can help lead to more informed and confidentdecisions. It is often possible to identify clear trends, such as reduced rainfall, that can help to definethe range of future climatic conditions. There are also usually a host of factors that are currentlyunknown but are in fact knowable, that is, those that could be known if the right analysis wascarried out. Examples include runoff variations and seasonality of water abstractions and increaseddemand due to projected population growth. Maintaining and improving monitoring networksand forecast systems are essential if these aspects of uncertainty are to be adequately addressed.BANGLADESH’S DILEMMA OF FLOODS AND DROUGHTSFloods frequently inundate large parts of Bangladesh. Since the 1980s a wide range of stakeholdersin the country has been discussing the development and implementation of the Bangladesh FloodAction Plan. Two opposing flood management approaches have dominated the debate – a capitalintensive“high-tech” intervention and a “living-with-floods” approach. So far, however, littleattention has been given to addressing the vulnerability of the people that are living in the floodproneareas. The people’s concern is not so much the floods per se, as they also benefit from thesethrough the good harvests that follow the floods. But, their livelihoods are particularly vulnerableto droughts with low-rainfall monsoons in summer and normal dry winters that lead to low yieldsoutside irrigated areas. In this sense there is more of a need to deal with water shortages and droughtcontrol than channelling large amounts of money into flood prevention. Addressing climate variabilityby directly linking it with people’s vulnerability is likely to produce different approaches that maybe less costly and more effective. 1320