Robust, Equitable and Stable Infrastructure Investment Pathways Require Cooperating Water Utilities to Understand Counterparty Risks
Abstract
Uncertainty with respect to climate change and growing water demands challenge urban water utilities seeking to maintain supply reliability. 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 regional power relationships within cooperative infrastructure pathways using multiple rival framings of regional robustness, each representing a competing hypothesis about how regional performance objectives should be prioritized. DU PathwaysERAS features new tools to measure the adaptive capacity of infrastructure investment pathway policies and evaluate time-evolving vulnerabilities for a region, as well as its cooperating water supply utilities individually. We demonstrate our framework on cooperative infrastructure development for a six-utility water supply partnership in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. Our results indicate that commonly employed framings of water supply robustness can have large and unintended adverse consequences for regional equity. Results further illustrate that regional and individual vulnerabilities are highly interdependent, evolve over time in unexpected ways, and emphasize the need to limit counterparty risks through carefully designed cooperative agreements. Beyond the Research Triangle, these results are broadly applicable to cooperative water supply infrastructure investment and management globally.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.H36F..06G