Adaptive Water Resources Management in California Under Climate and Demand Uncertainty

Abstract Submission: Adaptive water management is crucial for ensuring future water security in drought-prone cities, where more frequent and severe droughts are expected. Both supply- and demand-side management strategies offer valuable options for water agencies to achieve their water management targets such as water security, drought resilience, affordability, and equitable access to water. Additionally, recent research shows that adaptive planning and management approaches that deploy water infrastructure dynamically in response to changing hydrological conditions (e.g., if-and-when needed during a drought) can support low-cost drought resilience. However, most existing adaptive planning and management research focuses on specific case studies and dynamic supply strategies, under scenarios that assume static water demand.
This work introduces a modeling framework for integrated adaptive water supply planning and demand management under changing water demand and uncertain drought scenarios in California. We adapt the DRIPP framework (Drought Resilient Inter-scale Portfolio Planning; Zaniolo et al. (2023)) and incorporate dynamic water demand data from 209 water suppliers across California. Our framework enables (i) the development of optimal adaptive strategies for a set of representative water suppliers in California, selected considering varying regional conditions, population sizes, and water sources, and (ii) the identification and exploration of trade-offs between supply and demand management under uncertain demand scenarios. Our framework and trade-offs analysis of adaptive supply-demand management can be ultimately used by decision makers, planners, and utility operators to quantify the vulnerability and resilience of water systems across the state and accordingly plan adaptive measures in response to a rapidly changing climate and society.

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