Advancing Regional Water Supply Management and Infrastructure Investment
Pathways that are Equitable, Robust, Adaptive, and Cooperatively Stable
Abstract
Regionalization approaches wherein utilities in close geographic
proximity cooperate to manage drought risks and co-invest in new
infrastructure are increasingly necessary strategies for leveraging
economies of scale to meet growing demands and navigate deeply uncertain
risks. Successful regional cooperative investment and management
pathways, however, must equitably balance the interests of multiple
partners while navigating power relationships between regional actors.
In long-term infrastructure planning contexts, this challenge is
heightened by the evolving system-state dynamics, which may be
fundamentally reshaped by infrastructure investment. This work
introduces Equitable, Robust, Adaptive, and Stable Deeply Uncertain
Pathways (DU PathwaysERAS), an exploratory modeling framework for
developing regional water supply management and infrastructure
investment pathways. Our framework explores equity and power
relationships within cooperative pathways using multiple rival framings
of robustness, each representing a competing hypothesis about how
performance objectives should be prioritized. To capture the
time-evolving dynamics of infrastructure pathways, DU PathwaysERAS
features new tools to measure the adaptive capacity of pathway policies
and evaluate time-evolving vulnerability. We demonstrate our framework
on a six-utility water supply partnership seeking to develop cooperative
infrastructure investment pathways in the Research Triangle, North
Carolina. Our results indicate that commonly employed framings of
robustness can have large and unintended adverse consequences for
regional equity. Results further illustrate that regional and individual
vulnerabilities are highly interdependent, emphasizing the need to craft
agreements that limit counterparty risks from the actions of cooperating
partners. Beyond the Research Triangle, these results are broadly
applicable to cooperative water supply infrastructure investment and
management globally.