How can we make climate science more useful when it comes to making tough decisions?

At OzWater in May, Ricardo hosted a discussion about the application of climate science in water policy and management. Our panel was hosted by Associate Director Matthew Coulton and included expert insights from Matthew Coleman, General Manager Science Acquisition at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority; Lorena Oliveira, Manager Operating Strategy at WaterNSW; and Georgy Falster, DECRA Fellow at the University of Adelaide. 

Many water policy and management processes are built, explicitly or implicitly, on the assumption that future climate variability will largely reflect the climate variability we’ve observed since the early 20th century. All panellists agreed that these processes are long past their fit-for-purpose date. We’ve seen countless unprecedented climate events in the past 20 years and climate science tells us with high confidence that we will continue to see previously unseen climate conditions in the future. 

But the question of what to replace these processes with is still an open one. The inherent uncertainty in projections of climate change makes it impractical to simple replace historical data with forecast data while retaining the same high quantitative, probabilistic approaches. As hard as it is, we need to prepare for events that we know could happen, even when we can’t quantify the chance of them happening in a given planning period.  

While there are no silver bullet solutions, a novel approach is reversing – or at least mixing up - the typical science to policy process. The panellists lamented the days of commissioning a 700-page report from a group of scientists who spend a few years trying to predict the future, before handing it over to policy makers to deal with. Given the inherent uncertainty and complexity of climate science, such reports sometimes leave us in a more difficult position than when we started (Conceptually portrayed in Figure 1). 

The reality is, when it comes to water policy and management, we generally know the broad climate trends and we generally have few interventions available in our toolkit. Good policy requires clarity about what those interventions are. Once we have that clarity we can test the performance of each possible intervention against a range of plausible futures, and prioritise options that are “no regrets” or perform well in different futures (Conceptually portrayed in Figure 2). 

During the panel discussion, our experts shared lessons they’ve learned in their careers. Matthew Coleman spoke about the challenges associated with building and delivering long-term, collaborative science programs, while bringing stakeholders on the journey and responding to a range of new science as it becomes available. He noted that climate and water science isn’t fixed. New ideas and findings are presented regularly, which may be, or appear to be in conflict with other conclusions. We must be open and receptive to new work, while also having the discipline to invest in long-term programs that deliver high-value outputs and outcomes.  

Lorena noted that preparing for high-impact, low-probability events often involves costly interventions with long lead times. Deciding whether and when to invest in these measures is challenging, and it can be even more difficult to convince water users and governments to fund them. Climate mitigation strategies typically deliver multiple co-benefits. For this reason, it's important not only to improve how we communicate climate risks, but also how we measure and explain the benefits and opportunities of taking proactive action. Lorena also noted it is far more effective to seek agreement on key actions and their triggers in advance, rather than having to make those decisions during a crisis.  

Georgy noted that both paleoclimate data and climate model simulations show that over the past 1000 years Australia has seen droughts much longer than those experienced in recent history (last 125 years). Additionally, when combined with information from weather observations, both data types show that climate change is already causing both droughts and extreme rainfall events to be even more extreme. All three sources of information tell us more about the types of climate events that could happen, which we need to be prepared for. 

If you would like to discussion how climate information can support your organisation make better decisions, reach out to Matt at Matthew.Coulton@ricardo.com