It is projected that, once all calculations are completed, 2016 will be the new hottest year on record, surpassing a mark set one year ago.

The oceans are rising at an increasing rate and areas that depend on snow that provides fresh water for cities, farms, and fisheries during the summer months are too dry and warm, which means that there is a good chance that there will be insufficient water reserves come summer.

Some experts feel that instead of having tunnel-vision about future droughts and only focusing on plans for building desalination plants or increasing the size of reservoirs, there needs to be planning for multiple possible futures and more innovative planning and better water decisions need to be made.

According to the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty, the old water planning model was obsolete as it was retrospective; looking looked backward at demand and extending that line forward. This led to wild over-estimations and the building of bigger canals and larger reservoirs at a huge cost, which helps nothing if there is insufficient water to fill them. This is why deep uncertainty analysis is called for, according to Robert Lempert, President of the Society for Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty.

The deep uncertainty analysis is performed in stages; a utility outlines a water supply plan which is then put to a stress test by running it through computer model simulations with various assumptions for temperature, rainfall, regulatory changes, population growth, and more. This helps identify the conditions under which the plan does not meet water supply targets. The simulations lead to scenarios, similar to how the UN climate panel gets for carbon emissions.

Scenario planning allows utilities to question what, in the past, they would not usually have considered such as how will residents’ relationship to water change? Denver Water, for instance, is investigating storing water in aquifers for later recovery; something they would never have considered prior to conducting the analysis.

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