NeWater: New Approaches to Adaptive Water Management under Uncertainty

As of January 2006 the RMS program has changed to the Risk and Vulnerability program.

Integration and new approaches to manage risks in the light of increasing uncertainties require transformation processes in institutional resource regimes and management style. Technical solutions are no longer sufficient to tackle rising complexity in water management. Equally important are issues of good governance, with the human dimension in a prominent place. Scaling issues need to be explored to understand the complex dynamics of institutional resource regimes and to improve the match between biophysical and actor based scales. The strong tradition of local and regional water resources management has to be combined with integrative river basin approaches by embedding them in a perspective of change at multiple scales. This necessitates linking research areas heretofore developed rather independently with little exchange among them.

While integrated water resources management (IWRM) is widely accepted as the appropriate framework to deal with complex water resources management issues, the scientific base for IWRM is not yet fully developed. Current IWRM concept (GWP-TAC, 2000) does not elaborate on water management under uncertainties, nor does it fully develop approaches and methods towards adaptive water management strategies. It lacks both empirical knowledge and concepts to effectively transfer successful experiences across basins and frontiers. In the NeWater program, transition to adaptive water management is advocated as an essential and timely extension of the IWRM concept.

NeWater’s central focus is to explore different transition paths from currently prevailing regimes of river basin water management into more adaptive future regimes. Such transitions, in general, call for a highly integrated water resources management concept. The need for greater integration is now widely recognized and accepted but there is, in actuality, little theoretical foundation as well as practical experience regarding how this integration could be achieved or of the consequences of attempts to achieve it. Furthermore, the concept of IWRM remains nebulous. NeWater identifies key typical elements of the current water management system and then focuses its research on processes of transition of these elements to adaptive IWRM. Each key element is studied by novel approaches. Key IWRM areas where NeWater is expected to deliver new insights include:

• governance in water management (methods to arrive at polycentric, horizontal broad stakeholder participation in IWRM)
• sectoral integration (integration of IWRM and spatial planning; integration with climate change adaptation strategies, cross-sectoral optimisation and cost-benefit analysis)
• scales of analysis in IWRM (methods to resolve resource use conflicts; transboundary issues)
• information management (multi stakeholder dialogue, multi-agent systems modelling; role of games in decision making; novel monitoring systems for decision systems in water management)
• infrastructure (innovative methods for river basin buffering capacity; role of storage in adaptation to climate variability and climate extremes)
• finances and risk mitigation strategies in water management (new instruments, role of public-private arrangements in risk-sharing)
• stakeholder participation; promoting new ways of bridging between science, policy and implementation

For more information, contact Jan Sendzimir

Responsible for this page: Karolina Werner
Last updated: 02 Jan 2006