Adapting Water Management A Primer on Coping with Climate Change Page: 34
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PART C:
What can you do in response to climate change?7. Support climate-aware government and
development planning
Many government economic and social planning decisions
include assumptions about future availability of water.
Most significantly, agricultural development strategies
presuppose particularly water availability or climatic
conditions. Similarly, the development of industrial
locations and plans for future growth in urban centres
depend on assumptions about the availability of water,
whether in an absolute annual-scale level of availability,
the availability of water during certain seasons, or the
frequency of flooding and droughts as climate variability
increases. If assessments of changing water availability
are not taken into account in this planning, there are very
serious risks of significant adverse social and economic
consequences if insufficient water is available to support
the intended social or economic activity.8. Improve monitoring and responsiveness
capacity
Vulnerability assessments ideally capture the most
accurate state of knowledge of realized and potential
climate change impacts on a human or natural system
of interest. Ideally, these assessments also state the
limits of that knowledge and point out where uncertainty
remains. A key implication behind such "bounded
uncertainty" is developing institutional processes to
detect trends, encompass areas of limited knowledge,
and determine appropriate institutional responses. Ideally,
these mechanisms mean that assessing vulnerability and
rapidly distributing that knowledge becomes embodied
within planning and management institutions as a normal,
everyday process.
In practical terms, improving monitoring means identifying
hydrological, ecological, and/or social variables that can
serve as early-warning indicators of shifts in important
traits in system of interest. These changes may be short-
term impacts such as droughts, or they may be more
complex, such as a shift in the mean number of heat-
stress days for an endangered coldwater fish species.
Certain flow rates or key species densities may be triggers
that lead to direct intervention or changes in planning
or design policies, such as the need to revisit a basin-
wide environmental flows assessment process. Scenario
planning for responses to high-stress situations such as
sudden flood events before they occur is also critical, so
that sound reactions can be developed and negotiated
with minimal conflict.34
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Matthews, John H. & Quesne, Tom Le. Adapting Water Management A Primer on Coping with Climate Change, text, March 2009; Panda House Weyside Park Godalming Surrey GU7 1XR.. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc226773/m1/34/: accessed May 13, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .