IWA Publishing (of the International Water Association) and the Editors of the forthcoming book, Adaptive Water Management: Resilience in Practice, are seeking contributors. The book will focus on Adaptive Water Management (AWM) in a range of contexts. It aims to demystify AWM and focus on experiences of practitioners and decision-makers as they will be most familiar with successes and lessons learned to date.

Why is Adaptive Water Management relevant?

Water supply practitioners and policy-makers are increasingly being required to develop plans that embrace uncertainty and incorporate managing risks, as a means of adapting to demand and supply side changes experienced in water supply.  Uncertainties such as climate change, climatic variability, increased demand; and increased incidence and severity of shocks and stresses resulting from natural disasters all conspire to threaten water resources. This is creating a host of challenges in planning water supply services and ensuring the best use of resources.

AWM, coupled with longer-term funding which enables a long-term planning perspective, has the potential to deliver better outcomes for diminishing global water resources and the benefits they provide. However, this belief assumes that practitioners and decision-makers have the ability to deal with complexity, and can routinely examine and re-examine what does and does not work.

To explore how practitioners can reasonably and practically respond to such trends, this book will consider approaches in AWM, profiling the evidence, lessons and experiences that exist and that would help guide practitioners and decision-makers in the water sector to develop their own plans to target uncertainty and risk. 

About this book

Adaptive Water Management: Resilience in Practice aims to look at recent approaches, programming and policy and the elements that comprise effective AWM by elaborating on experiences. These may include (but are not limited to):

• Adaptive programming/approaches which integrate learning from practice: Examples of flexible approaches which allow for structured learning to be input to programme design and re-design on a regular basis. This may include learning through networks and the support they provide to practitioner learning.
• Multi-stakeholder and cross-sector collaboration: Formal or informal collaboration that anticipates managing risks and challenges to current and future water supply.
• Planning for AWM, Participatory Monitoring and Decision Support Tools: This includes innovative uses of data and decision support tools and how they contribute to planning. This may also include scenario modelling, as a means to develop future plans. The use of historical climate data for planning and improved decision making could also be addressed. Additionally, looking at how monitoring tools, and processes/approaches such as citizen science can further adaptive management outcomes in the water sector.
• AWM in humanitarian contexts to build more resilient management structures: A crucial component of humanitarian response is to plan the transition from emergency to post emergency and long-term situations. Authors who are widely experienced in emergency WASH are encouraged to bring together examples of context, practical experiences and findings to demonstrate the application of AWM in emergencies.
• Uncertainty and policy-making: Contributors will be sought to illustrate how water utilities and Governments apply an AWM approach to strengthen performance and institutional capability.

Taken together, the contributions would provide a useful indication as to how AWM is being applied in practice and highlight areas for greater focus as practitioners strive to deal with inherent complexity.

Priority will be given to contributions that can effectively demonstrate the practical lessons and insights experienced from recent application. The editors will work with contributors to draw out lessons and document how such insights may contribute to a better understanding of AWM in future practice. 

Submit now to contribute

We are calling for abstracts (no more than 1000 words) that should briefly present the case, approach or experience to be demonstrated, the methodology used, and the main lessons put forth in the paper. The process of finding contributors will be concluded in August 2018. Submissions should be original and not under consideration elsewhere. Authors are asked to avoid technical or academic jargon and spell out Acronyms in full when used for the first time. It is also encouraged that authors have their abstracts checked by a native speaker of English prior to submission, this will help ensure that peer abstracts are judged on merit.

To demonstrate interest, please contact the Editors:

Leslie Morris-Iveson: leslie [at] environmentalrecoveryconsult.com

St. John Day: singeday [at] gmail.com