Novel Perspectives on Environmental Dynamic Resilience: Adapting Urban Water Systems to a Changing Climate

Climate change imposes significant pressure on existing urban water systems. Prolonged low-flow periods, attributed to shifting climatic conditions, swiftly reduce the available water storage in reservoirs and threaten the quality of river water. This paper introduces a framework for assessing the environmental dynamic resilience (EDR) of urban water systems. The EDR framework stands as a state-of-the-art risk assessment tool that incorporates the dynamic nature and recovery time of water systems. The framework employs outputs from a series of models, including climate, hydrological, and urban water system models, as input data. To validate the findings from the proposed framework, environmental reliability (ER) is utilized as a conventional risk metric in the realm of water resource management. London, UK, serves as a case area to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed climate-related risk metric. The findings suggest a projected 10.5% decrease in the overall EDR during the near-future period (2020–2049) when compared to the baseline period (1975–2004). The sharpest declines in EDR are anticipated for the water quality (15.4%) and reservoir parts (13.6%) of the urban water system. Conversely, ER aligns with the insights from the introduced framework, suggesting a reliability reduction of approximately 6.8%. Nevertheless, ER neglects the recovery time essential for attaining full system functionality, leading to a potential underestimation of the climate-related risks to the urban water system.