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Sustainability transitions in urban water management
Published in Thomas Bolognesi, Francisco Silva Pinto, Megan Farrelly, Routledge Handbook of Urban Water Governance, 2023
Aaron Deslatte, Margaret Garcia, Elizabeth A. Koebele, John M. Anderies
To conceptually map urban water systems using the CIS Framework, we identify PIPs as the water boards, commissions, or councils that develop utility policies for water supply, transmission, distribution, and conservation, as well as the regulators or managers who implement and evaluate the policies. The NI consists of the water resources, including surface and groundwater. The primary RUs in each case are municipal water customers that use water in residential, commercial, and industrial applications. The PI comprises both “hard” infrastructure (wellfields, storage reservoirs, pump stations, and transmission and distribution mains) and “soft” infrastructure (rules, norms, and strategies), which create the circuitry for governing, managing, and enforcing resource constraints.
The three-infrastructures framework and water risks in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia
Published in Australasian Journal of Water Resources, 2023
John Williams, Matthew J. Colloff, R. Quentin Grafton, Shahbaz Khan, Zahra Paydar, Paul Wyrwoll
Grey infrastructure in the MDB encompasses farm dams and intercepting infrastructures that enable floodplain harvesting (such as levees), as well as technologies that reduce water losses within irrigation systems (such as lining channels, better farm layouts, sprinkler, and drip irrigation). Soft infrastructure includes water resource plans, legislation, water entitlements and water allocations (Grafton, Horne, and Wheeler 2016a), audits, compliance, education and training, scientific research, and the many elements of water management, policy, and regulation. Green infrastructure includes the many elements of the MDB landscape that encompasses over 1 million km2, from Queensland to South Australia. These assets include the billabongs, streams and rivers, estuaries, hills and mountains, and the hundreds of both small and large wetlands that provide a home to flora and fauna and that convey and store water through the landscape.
Reconciling complexity and deep uncertainty in infrastructure design for climate adaptation
Published in Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure, 2022
Alysha M. Helmrich, Mikhail V. Chester
Adaptive infrastructure systems should be approached with flexible and agile designs in order to address future challenges such as climate change (Chester & Allenby, 2018). To achieve adaptive systems, Chester and Allenby (2018) propose 10 competencies: roadmapping, designing for obsolescence, hardware-to-software focus, risk-to-resilience based, compatibility, connectivity, modularity, organic structures, a culture of change, and transdisciplinary education. While achieving completely flexible and agile infrastructure will likely take a transformative alteration of hard and soft infrastructures, where hard infrastructure consists of physical systems such as water, power, and transportation networks and soft infrastructure entails institutions such as politics and finance, emerging hard infrastructure design approaches, including safe-to-fail infrastructure and adaptive management, are being discussed as pathways forward (Dittrich et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2019).
Mega infrastructure projects as agents of change: new perspectives on ‘the global infrastructure gap’
Published in Journal of Mega Infrastructure & Sustainable Development, 2019
Harry T. Dimitriou, Brian G. Field
Physical infrastructure as described above is sometimes referred to as ‘hard infrastructure’ and the non-physical infrastructure as ‘soft infrastructure’. This categorisation should not, however, be confused with an alternative use of the terms whereby physical infrastructure assets, such as those of the transport, water, energy and real estate sectors are frequently referred to as ‘hard infrastructure’, while the physical infrastructure assets of the health, education and social welfare sectors are referred to as ‘soft infrastructure’. We do not intend to take a position here regarding this debate but merely point out that these different perspectives are often a source of confusion, misunderstanding, mis-analysis and debate among different stakeholders.