Climate risk-informed decision analysis (CRIDA): ‘top-down’ vs ‘bottom-up’ decision making for planning water resources infrastructure

Water Policy ◽

10.2166/wp.2021.243 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Joe Manous ◽

Eugene Z. Stakhiv

Keyword(s):

Water Resources ◽

Decision Analysis ◽

Modular Design ◽

Climate Scenario ◽

Informed Decision ◽

Evaluation Framework ◽

Climate Risk ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Analytical Approaches

Abstract Climate risk-informed decision analysis (CRIDA) is a guidebook that lays out an evaluation framework and decision procedures to deal with climate uncertainties that are consistent with traditional agency water resources planning frameworks. CRIDA guidelines complement existing institutional guidance on recognizing circumstances when more complex risk-based climate analysis may be needed, above those required by standard planning procedures. The procedures are based on the concept of ‘decision-scaling’ judgments to qualitatively assess levels of future risk and analytical uncertainty stemming from climate change-related uncertainties, and as a guide for choosing specific analytical approaches and appropriate levels of analysis. CRIDA addresses how much detail is appropriate for a given problem setting, depending on infrastructure type and function, whether it is new design or rehabilitation of existing infrastructure, modular design or long-life infrastructure. CRIDA was structured to resolve the contentious issue of deciding under what circumstances a ‘top-down’ climate scenario-driven analysis ought to be conducted versus a more traditional ‘bottom-up’ vulnerability assessment, based on conventional agency project feasibility procedures. The procedures for such vulnerability assessments and planning procedures are well-represented in classical approaches, such as those included in the 1983 U.S. Water Resources Council's ‘Principles and Guidelines’. These commonly used procedures promote normative evaluation protocols and decision rules that generate alternative solutions which minimize risk-cost outcomes.

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From risk assessment to adaptation pathways: improvement of Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis for the Limari basin in Chile

10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-8203 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Christianne Luger ◽

Ad Jeuken ◽

Koen Verbist ◽

Saket Pande ◽

Andrew Warren ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Decision Analysis ◽

Risk Perceptions ◽

Planning Process ◽

Cost Effective ◽

Project Planning ◽

Informed Decision ◽

Climate Risk ◽

Overall Acceptability ◽

In Series

The Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA) framework incorporates the uncertainties of climate change that impact project planning, socioeconomic justification, and engineering design into a step-wise and collaborative planning process to guide a technical analyst to low-regret risk- and cost-effective solutions; Research has been carried out to demonstrate and improve, through additional guidelines, the usability of CRIDA, in a pilot for the Limari basin in Chile. The added guidelines (1) offer the analyst numerically based justifications for analytical decisions to ensure a more structured application of CRIDA and (2) improves on co-design aspects by incorporating stakeholder risk perceptions and opinions explicitly in the process. The Limari Basin has experienced an increase in drought frequency and severity over the last decades. A strategic approach for adaptation is recommended through CRIDA based on an evaluation of the future risk to climate change and the confidence in this analysis and a subsequent systematic assessments of adaptation options. The resulting strategy requires the increase of water supply robustness by adding new water sources that can be implemented in combination with flexible measures for managing demand (i.e. implementing agricultural meshes and improving irrigation efficiency) in parallel or in series to create adaptation pathways. The study demonstrated the functionality of CRIDA. While the added guidelines required more processing time, subjectivity in the method is reduced thus also reducing possible bias introduced by the analyst. In addition, overall acceptability of the proposed strategies is improved by incorporating stakeholder risk perceptions and opinions explicitly in the process.

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The Contribution of Online Reviews for Quality Evaluation of Cultural Tourism Offers: The Experience of Italian Museums

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su132313340 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (23) ◽

pp. 13340

Author(s):

Deborah Agostino ◽

Marco Brambilla ◽

Silvio Pavanetto ◽

Paola Riva

Keyword(s):

Content Analysis ◽

Quality Evaluation ◽

Topic Model ◽

Online Reviews ◽

Cultural Tourism ◽

Critical Discussion ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Quality Dimensions ◽

Analytical Approaches

In the cultural tourism field, there has been an increasing interest in adopting data-driven approaches that are aimed at measuring the service quality dimensions through online reviews. To date, studies measuring quality dimensions in cultural tourism settings through content analysis of online user-generated reviews are mainly based on manual approaches. When the content analysis is automated, these studies do not compare different analytical approaches. Our paper enters this field by comparing two different automated content analysis approaches to evaluate which of the two is more adequate for assessing the quality dimensions through user-generated reviews in an empirical setting of 100 Italian museums. Specifically, we compare a ‘top-down’ content analysis approach that is based on a supervised classification built on policy makers’ guidelines and a ‘bottom-up’ approach that is based on an unsupervised topic model of the online words of reviewers. The resulting museum quality dimensions are compared, showing that the ‘bottom-up’ approach reveals additional quality dimensions compared with those obtained through the ‘top-down’ approach. The misalignment of the results of the ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches to quality evaluation for museums enhances the critical discussion on the contribution that data analytics can offer to support decision making in cultural tourism.

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Emergent Properties of Water Resources and Associated Watershed Systems

Proceedings ◽

10.3390/ecws-4-06417 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 48 (1) ◽

pp. 18

Author(s):

D.L. Marrin

Keyword(s):

Water Resources ◽

Complex Systems ◽

Emergent Properties ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Emergent Phenomena ◽

Scientific Disciplines ◽

Collective Interactions ◽

Novel Structures

A challenge to managing water resources is characterizing the heterogeneity created by the interactions among hydrological, ecological and anthropological processes. An option applied to other scientific disciplines includes identifying and analyzing emergent phenomena in complex systems, whose components self-organize into novel structures or processes via their collective interactions with each other and the environment. A new level of organization and complexity emerges that cannot be predicted from or attributed to the components alone. Predictions based on the functionally emergent properties of watershed systems (top-down) differ from predictions based on reductionist models (bottom-up). This presentation reviews the ways in which emergent properties may be applied to water resources and associated systems.

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Combining hydroeconomic modelling and bottom-up approaches for climate change adaptation. Application to the Jucar river basin (Spain).

10.5194/egusphere-egu21-15924 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Manuel Pulido-Velazquez ◽

Patricia Marcos-Garcia ◽

Antonio Lopez-Nicolas ◽

Hector Macian-Sorribes ◽

Adria Rubio-Martin

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Water Resources ◽

Agricultural Sector ◽

Adaptation Strategies ◽

Economic Losses ◽

Top Down ◽

Adaptation Measures ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Precipitation Decrease ◽

Basin Scale

In many regions of the world, such as in the Southern Mediterranean area, water management has been challenging for long; however, climate change could act as an amplification factor and trigger an unprecedented situation. Several approaches have been proposed for the design of adaptation strategies for water resources systems. Although top-down approaches have been traditionally preferred, several authors have pointed out their relative lack of success when it comes to decision making. On the other hand, participative bottom-up approaches have the advantage of involving the stakeholders from the early stages of the strategy development, which could be crucial for the strategy's success. In order to overcome the shortcomings of both approaches and take advantage of their strengths, we propose a mixed bottom-up/top-down approach to define adaptation strategies at basin scale.First, climate change impact on local water availability (future local inflows) is characterized using a top-down approach. Next, local knowledge is used through a participatory process in a bottom-up approach to foresight future scenarios of evolution of the agricultural sector and define locally relevant adaptation strategies. Each measure is characterized in terms of cost and efficiency. Water demands are characterized using economic demand curves. Finally, we used a hydroeconomic model to integrate the information obtained through top-down and bottom-up approaches to evaluate the net benefit of the different adaptation strategies, and select a socially acceptable and economically efficient program of measures for the climate and socioeconomic scenarios.This methodology has been applied to the Jucar basin, a highly regulated basin with a fragile equilibrium between available water resources and demands. Climate change is expected to accentuate the current problems. The results show the importance of considering the spatial variability of climate change impacts in the basin. Temperature increase and precipitation decrease would be higher in the basin headwaters than in the coastal area, which conditions future inflows. In relation to adaptation measures, the stakeholders preferred the change from gravity to drip irrigation, the use of non-conventional water resources (wastewater reuse and desalination) and measures related to water governance. Finally, the results obtained from the hydroeconomic model show that, for most of the considered climate scenarios, the selected measures allow a significant reduction of the economic losses in the system.Acknowledgements:&#160;This study has been supported by the ADAPTAMED project (RTI2018-101483-B-I00), funded by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO) of Spain and with EU FEDER funds.

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Towards a quantification of the water planetary boundary

10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-20525 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Lan Wang-Erlandsson ◽

Tom Gleeson ◽

Fernando Jaramillo ◽

Samuel C. Zipper ◽

Dieter Gerten ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Spatial Scales ◽

Scientific Evidence ◽

Terrestrial Ecosystems ◽

Evaluation Framework ◽

Earth System ◽

Top Down ◽

Bottom Up ◽

Weighting Factors ◽

The Earth ◽

The Stability

The planetary boundaries framework defines nine Earth system processes that together demarcate a safe operating space for humanity at the planetary scale. Freshwater - the bloodstream of the biosphere - is an obvious member of the planetary boundary framework.&#160; Water fluxes and stores play a key role for the stability of the Earth&#8217;s climate and the world&#8217;s aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Recent work has proposed to represent the water planetary boundary through six sub-boundaries based on the five primary water stores, i.e., atmospheric water, soil moisture, surface water, groundwater, and frozen water. In order to make it usable on all spatial scales we examine bottom-up and top-down approaches for quantification of the water planetary boundary. For the bottom-up approaches, we explore possible spatially distributed variables defining each of the proposed sub-boundaries, as well as possible weighting factors and keystone regions that can be used for aggregation of the distributed water sub-boundaries to the global scale. For the top-down approaches, we re-examine the stability of key biomes and tipping elements in the Earth System that may be crucially influenced by water cycle modifications. To identify the most appropriate variables for representing the water planetary boundary, we evaluate the range of explored variables with regard to scientific evidence and scientific representation using a hierarchy-based evaluation framework. Finally, we compare the highest ranked top-down and bottom-up approaches in terms of the scientific outcome and implications for governance. In sum, this comprehensive and systematic identification and evaluation of variables, weighting factors, and baseline conditions provides a detailed basis for the future operational quantification of the water planetary boundary.&#160;

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