Addressing Water Governance Challenges in the Anthropocene - Climate Change and Water Governance: Adaptive Capacity in Chile and Switzerland - page 5

Additionally, it should be noted that uncertainty does not stem only from the
increasing risks and hazards for a potentially warmer world, but also from the very
nature of the knowledge system used to map out climate impacts. Despite significant
advances in climate change science and modelling techniques, the uncertainty asso-
ciated with such projections (rather than predictions) at either global or regional
levels is likely to continue for the foreseeable future (Carter et al. 2007 ) . Yet, deci-
sions about how to adapt the governance and management of complex water resource
systems to climate change impacts cannot just wait until climate model projections
are more precise. 2 While models can project a range of futures or alternative sce-
narios of change, the complex nature of the bio-spherical processes that drive water
hydrological patterns means that in the conceivable future short and long term man-
agement decisions about future water quality, security and availability will still be
subject to a large range of uncertainty in both projected and unanticipated changes.
Social systems have tended to have rules or tools to cope with normal ranges of
uncertainties, or moderate deviations from the norm (what Mathews et al. ( 2011 )
term 'predictable certainty'), such as wet years followed by dry years on an inter-
annual or decadal timescale (Smit and Wandel 2006 ; Yohe and Tol 2002 ) . For example,
from a governance perspective, prioritisation rules may kick in when indicators
suggest a dry year is underway. From a management perspective, reservoir storage
could tie over water provision during dry years, or flood management strategies
such as dykes and early warning systems might protect against high precipitation
events (Herrfahrdt-Pähle 2010 ; Huntjens et al. 2010 ; Smit and Wandel 2006 ) .
However, climate change embodies a more unpredictable and indeterminate form of
uncertainty (Matthews et al. 2011 ) or irreversible changes in state (reduced run off
contribution from glacier and snow melt, shifts in seasonality, increasingly consecu-
tive dry years) that may lie outside or beyond the boundaries of past and present
coping ranges of water management and governance regimes 3 (Smit and Wandel
2006 ; Yohe and Tol 2002 ) .
Climate change is therefore seen as exacerbating these broader challenges affecting
water governance, acting as an overarching pressure that causes these underlying
stresses on water institutions to become even more pronounced as impacts intensify
(Lettenmaier et al. 2008 ). Since climate change is a systemic threat that will have
significant interactions with other drivers of change (as discussed above), it will
require fundamental shifts in how water governance regimes operate, and how they
interact and coordinate across local, regional, national, and trans-boundary scales.
More specifically, increasing uncertainty of future conditions, or 'non stationarity'
2 Also refer to http://www.newater.info/index.php?pid=1045
3 Adaptive capacity has been analyzed in various ways, including via thresholds and “coping
ranges”, defined by the conditions that a system can deal with, accommodate, adapt to, and recover
from (de Loe and Kreutzwiser 2000; Jones 2001; Smit et al. 2000; Smit and Pilifosova 2001, 2003).
Most communities and sectors can cope with (or adapt to) normal climatic conditions and moderate
deviations from the norm, but exposures involving extreme events that may lie outside the coping
range, or may exceed the adaptive capacity of the community. (Smit and Wandel 2006 , p 287).