HR: 0800h
AN: H21G-0824    [Abstracts]
TI: Scenario Planning for Water Resources: a Forward-looking Approach Combining Science, Demographic Trends and Policy
AU: * Stewart, S
EM: sstewart@hwr.arizona.edu
AF: University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210158-B, Tucson, AZ 85721-0158, United States
AU: Liu, Y
EM: yliu@hwr.arizona.edu
AF: University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210158-B, Tucson, AZ 85721-0158, United States
AU: Hartmann, H
EM: hollyoregon@juno.com
AF: University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210158-B, Tucson, AZ 85721-0158, United States
AU: Mahmoud, m
EM: mahmoud@email.arizona.edu
AF: University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210158-B, Tucson, AZ 85721-0158, United States
AU: gupta, h
EM: hoshin.gupta@hwr.arizona.edu
AF: University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210158-B, Tucson, AZ 85721-0158, United States
AU: dominguez, f
AF: University of Arizona, P.O. Box 210158-B, Tucson, AZ 85721-0158, United States
AU: Thorsten, W
EM: thorsten@engr.psu.edu
AF: Penn State University, Civil and Environmental Engineering 226B Sackett Bldg., University Park, pa 16802, United States
AB: Although there has been much written about the use of scenario analysis for long-term planning, particularly with respect to the decisions facing firms, the extant literature has few examples of scenarios explicitly applied to water resource issues. Fewer still have considered short-fuse events such as floods and failure of water retention and conveyance structures in the context of longer-term scenarios for water resources planning. We report progress on an effort to develop a unified framework for constructing scenarios for water resource management. We place particular emphasis on semi-arid environments and forces external to the traditional water management process such as high-impact weather and climate events or unforeseen changes in government institutions that may drive unanticipated change in environmental systems. Most water resource scenarios are typically based on high, medium and low projections of demographics (gpcd), climate (precipitation, temperature), and perhaps institutional variables (conveyance infrastructure, legal issues). We discuss the relative merits of this with other approaches including: probabalistic scenarios, which explicitly weight the likelihood of different outcomes; anticipatory scenarios, which consider how to achieve or avoid some subjective future state; strategic scenarios, which seeks to identify the inconsistencies between disciplines in the way the environmental models are constructed
DE: 1630 Impacts of global change (1225)
DE: 1834 Human impacts
DE: 1880 Water management (6334)
DE: 6334 Regional planning (1880)
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting