Broadening resilience: An evaluation of policy and planning for drinking water resilience in 100 US cities

Abstract

Around the world, drinking water systems provide safe, accessible drinking water to the communities they serve. While they are faced with a growing number of short and long-term challenges, assessing the resilience of drinking water systems—or their ability to cope with disturbances and surprise and continuously adapt to stress and change—is an ongoing challenge. Many drinking water resilience assessment methodologies focus narrowly on the technical dimensions of the resilience of infrastructure systems, ignoring the human or environmental dimensions, and consider resilience to the present, ignoring resilience to future change. To fill this gap, we developed a conceptual framework and scoring methodology for evaluating municipal-scale policy and planning for drinking water system resilience. Our approach considers social, technical, and environmental elements of resilience at broad spatial and temporal scales. We then used this methodology to assess policy and planning for drinking water resilience in 100 U.S. cities. We found that municipalities are at very different stages in their policy and planning for drinking water resilience, particularly in terms of the attention they give to climate change and their consideration of the broader social dimensions of resilience. Overall, larger cities and those with more liberal populations are likely to have higher policy and planning scores. The findings highlight the variation in municipal policy and planning for drinking water system resilience, and the importance of community characteristics as drivers of resilience planning. Our approach is transferable to assessing resilience for drinking water systems within and beyond the U.S.