The dominant paradigms for how we manage water resources for the past century have been derived from engineering (quantity and quality) and from economics (water use efficiency). At best, these paradigms resulted in a “balanced” sustainability framework for freshwater ecosystems. The natural flow regime (NFR) presented a challenge to these paradigms by mobilizing ecohydrological variables, particularly seasonality and variability, to link ecological and human outcomes. Updates to the NFR added elements of infrastructure design and operations, planning, and non-stationarity and climate adaptation. Concurrent with these trends has been a deepening awareness that freshwater resources are embedded across many sectors and that economic development is essential to how we align efforts around water policy, investment, and poverty alleviation.
A balanced approach to water management may actually be counterproductive today, however. Quickening shocks in political, trade, and technological systems are interacting with new climate regimes, which reinforce both the limitations of engineering and economic paradigms and the need to sustain the ecological and hydrological foundations of our economies despite climate-economic shocks and transformations. Our challenge now focuses on how to manage dynamic but data-scarce ecohydrological systems for uncertain futures, especially in emerging economies.
Traditionally, the NFR has served as a baseline and reference point; given the complexity of our current decision environment, we may be able to use the NFR to constrain and inform our ecological and economic futures. New tools are beginning to emerge that translate core NFR concepts into operational pathways, ranging from project scales to financial and national planning processes. This talk will describe several initiatives that reenvision the NFR for new domains and audiences, including infrastructure design, climate finance, measuring climate resilience, and water allocation systems spanning multiple economic sectors.