Revisiting the Principals of Water Resource Management Under Uncertain Conditions: What to Do When Predictions are Wrong?

Abstract:

Water resource management is a complex interaction among various factors, including water availability, water demand and socio-economic values. Substantial increase in the extent of human water use has occurred in the past recent. This coincides with major shifts in socio-economic values and high variability in water availability through time and space. Our knowledge about global and regional water availability often comes from a cascade of climate and hydrological predictions. This knowledge is limited and highly uncertain as there are known limitation in climate models and wide-range of uncertainties in hydrological models. By focusing on the water resource system of Canadian Prairies, it will be discussed

(1) how much the state-of-the-art water supply predictions can be off from reality;

(2) how much the errors and uncertainty in water supply can propagate into the water resource management decisions; and finally

(3) how these limitations can be reduced if we look differently at water resource management under uncertain conditions.

Bio:

Born in Italy, raised in Iran, he got his PhD from University of Birmingham UK, looking at calibration of conceptual models using multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. He moved to Canada in 2009 as a postdoctoral research fellow and since then he has focused on various aspects of water security in northern regions, including risks in oil-sand reclamation, extreme rainfall under global warming conditions and vulnerability of water resource systems to both climate variability and change. He is now a research associate at the Global Institute for Water Security, University of Saskatchewan, and mainly thinks about how to include water resource management in large-scale models that are used for climate and hydrological predictions.