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Well-designed public policy stimulates social progress. However, when governments translate political vision into programmes for social change, the complexity of issues can overwhelm the policy-making process, creating disappointment and suboptimal outcomes. In this paper we examine why evidence-based policy-making approaches often fail to provide policy-makers with credible, consistent and clear outcomes matching broad social interest. The need for public policy primarily arises from a lack of perfect knowledge, which causes individuals and agencies to behave in ways that counter social interest. We therefore suggest that effective public policy formulation involves: determining what evidence is available, relevant and useful; as well as identifying critical gaps to making public policy necessary and meaningful. Murray-Darling Basin case examples highlight key stages in effective natural resource policy formulation, and sources of difficulties that need to be managed to maximize scientific contributions. These examples show that effective public policy decisions can still be made and information asymmetry managed via strong evidence, expert analysis to verify that evidence, and an understanding of knowledge gaps such that critical interventions can be agreed upon and objectives achieved in view of how they will be managed and resourced. Finally, we draw attention to the opportunities available and challenges that exist for hydrologists, economists and other social scientists to work together in assisting the policy process, and in particular to minimize the burden of information constraints in making effective water resource policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The hydrological cycle has been substantially influenced by climate change and human activities. It is therefore of utmost importance to analyze the impact of climate change on hydrology, particularly on a regional scale, in order to understand potential future changes of water resources and water-related disaster, and provide support for regional water management. However, during the evaluation of climate change impact on hydrology or water resources, large uncertainty exists. In this paper, the Soil Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) model is used to investigate the potential impact of climate change on hydrology of the upper reaches of Qiantang River Basin, East China, for the future period 2011–2100. The uncertainty is considered by employing upgraded reliability ensemble averaged GCM climate projections under three emission scenarios A1B, A2 and B1 for three different stages of the future period. These projections are downscaled and used in the hydrological model. Impact of climate change on precipitation, potential evapotranspiraton and river runoff is then investigated. The model calibration and validation outcomes show reasonable performance of the SWAT model. The final results suggest that annual river runoff will likely decrease almost under all emission scenarios and time stages of the future period. Particularly, at Jinhua Station, substantial decrease of annual river runoff can be noticed, indicating less water resource possibly available for the region in future. Simulated monthly patterns show that the largest decrease will likely occur in winter while increases will occur in summer, implying possible more water-related disasters in this region. However, it is also noticed that the change signs/amount could be different under different emission scenarios and time stages, indicating large uncertainty involved in the impact analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The climate scenarios of the IPCC suggest that adaptation to future climate change will be required. The North Sea Region, a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean between Great Britain, Scandinavia, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium, is particularly affected due to rising sea level and a changing water balance. Water management plays a key role in sustainable management of natural and societal resources. This paper presents a participatory study of community approaches to regional adaptation to climate change. Water management adaptation options to regional climate induced changes until 2050 were developed together with stakeholders for the Wesermarsch County (Northern Germany). Available information on expected regional climate change and a modelling study on hydrological change suggested that adaptation of water management will be required until 2050. A regional stakeholder forum formulated a vision on how the Wesermarsch should look like in 2050. Following the holistic approach of collaborative planning, two stakeholder groups developed an adaptation portfolio on how urban and rural areas could adapt their water management to cope with the expected changes. Since most of the stakeholders do not want the county to undergo significant changes in terms of landscape and land use, they proposed technical measures to enforce flood protection and enhance the performance of the existing water management system. Adaptation in terms of land use change was not proposed although information on comparable examples from similar regions was available. To justify the proposed adaptation options, available information on expected climate change impacts was used selectively. Uncertainty in model projections was partly ignored to legitimate suggesting inflexible (technical) adaptation measures. However, collaborative planning proved to be helpful for a joint adaptation to climate change at the regional scale. Stakeholders as well as scientists took active part in the participatory learning process as required by EU directives. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Summary: Public water supply systems are designed to maintain water supply through extended periods of dry weather without excessive cost or environmental damage. During a drought, water suppliers can take further measures to enhance supplies or reduce demand. The introduction of drought measures is usually formalised in a drought plan, but there is often little evidence that the plan will prove successful during a range of feasible droughts. As the climate changes, recent hydrological data may be a poor guide to future drought, and planned actions may prove insufficient to maintain adequate water supplies. This paper describes a method for testing the resilience of water company drought plans to droughts that are outside recent hydrological experience. Long severe droughts of the nineteenth century provide an opportunity to test water supply system behaviour in a range of realistic droughts. The method developed combines system modelling with an interactive approach that asks water system managers to work through the actions that they would take at different stages of the drought, without knowledge of subsequent drought development. The approach was tested for two contrasting English water resource systems. In both cases, the existing water supply and drought planning measures succeeded in maintaining water supply, but significant demand restrictions and engineering measures had to be introduced. Wider use of the method by water supply planners should allow the refinement of drought and water supply plans, and will also create increased awareness of the actions necessary to manage a range of droughts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Future water management will shift from building new water supply systems to better operating existing ones. The variation of water values in time and space will increasingly motivate efforts to address water scarcity and reduce water conflicts. Hydro-economic models represent spatially distributed water resource systems, infrastructure, management options and economic values in an integrated manner. In these tools water allocations and management are either driven by the economic value of water or economically evaluated to provide policy insights and reveal opportunities for better management. A central concept is that water demands are not fixed requirements but rather functions where quantities of water use at different times have varying total and marginal economic values. This paper reviews techniques to characterize the economic value of water use and include such values in mathematical models. We identify the key steps in model design and diverse problems, formulations, levels of integration, spatial and temporal scales, and solution techniques addressed and used by over 80 hydro-economic modeling efforts dating back 45-years from 23 countries. We list current limitations of the approach, suggest directions for future work, and recommend ways to improve policy relevance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• H-CMLM new method to empower the analysis of temporal rivers runoff behaviour. • H-CMLM is developed through the hybridization of MGLM and Causal Reasoning techniques. • H-CMLM is successfully applied to three Spanish basins with disparate features. • Results from modules are robust and shown through Dependence Mitigation Graph (DMG). • Outcome is very useful for the optimal dimensioning of hydraulic infrastructures. This paper describes the joint development of two different methods for temporal riveŕs runoff assessment. This is performed through a hybrid approach by means of Multivariate General Linear Models (MGLM; inspired by MLR as a statistical method), and Causal Reasoning (CR; as non-linear ones). This innovative methodological approach, named Hybrid Causal Multivariate Linear Modelling (H-CMLM), is mainly aimed to empower the analysis of temporal hydrological records behaviour. H-CMLM has been successfully applied to three different Spanish basins (Adaja, Mijares and Porma) which were chosen due to their disparate features. Results were divided in quantitative and qualitative. Numerical results show a very high level of equivalence between the average value of temporal dependence provided by MLM module and the continuous behaviour of temporal dependence computed by CR module and visualized through Dependence Mitigation Graph (DMG). This high coherent outcome from both modules makes the analysis much more robust from a stochastic hydrology point of view. Values for average temporal dependence are very useful for the optimal dimensioning of hydraulic infrastructures like reservoirs. Furthermore, given the annual scale of the analysis, water planning and management of several water uses such as domestic water supply, agriculture, industrial demands, among others, can be highly assisted by this new H_C-MLM method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]