Supporting water utilities, governments and businesses to deal with uncertainty and impacts of climate change, and implement long-term planning to ensure cities and towns maintain water security.

Utilities are planning and managing service delivery under an increasingly uncertain future, due to phenomena such as climate change and population growth, as well as a range of potential external disruptors including technological advances and changes in ownership models.

For more than two decades, ISF has supported water utilities and local governments, through our integrated approach to drought response and long-term planning, drawing on systems thinking and scenario planning. We help our partners understand the opportunities, risks and potential business models.

We assess how different supply and demand options increase water security in the long term, as well as rapidly in response to drought. We have designed adaptive planning frameworks for ensuring water security in the face of uncertainty and seek to ensure that all viable options are kept open for later consideration as the assumptions about the future are better understood.

An aerial photograph of Warangamba Dam near Sydney

PROJECT | 2022-2023

Aerial shot of a large dam / water catchment area.

Future catchment scenarios

Six future scernarios were developed to help WaterNSW develop meaningful insights for catchment planning and decision-making processes.

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PROJECT | 2022

Storm surge

Building utility resilience to climate shocks

Demonstrating how diverse actors are increasing resilience by adapting their assets to climate induced shocks.

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PROJECT | 2019-2021

Corporate risk: WaterCorp

Water Corporation, Western Australia asked ISF to provide research that would support improvement of the organisation’s risk management framework. The initial research objectives were to: 1) explore the potential to develop better approaches and models for stratifying corporate risk drawing on a wide range of skills and disciplinary fields; and 2) apply these methods across multiple areas of the business, with risks arising from a wide variety of causal factors.

 

Employing a flexible research design, ISF considered approaches to risk prioritisation and stratification from outside the realms of traditional risk management in the water industry. With no obvious candid methods to transplant, the ISF and Water Corporation project team developed a novel approach to risk stratification that would be meaningful across Water Corporation’s business, and that would enhance existing risk management processes. The approach drew from various fields including complex system thinking and multi criteria decision support, but was in the end a co-creation between ISF researchers and Water Corporation risk practitioners. The project produced a novel risk stratification process, a decision framework, and a set of risk characteristics for assessing risks on criteria beyond likelihood and consequence.

 

Location: Western Australia

Client: Water Corporation

Researchers: Simon Fane,  Alison Atherton,  Pierre Mukheibir,  Joanne Chong

Tap with dry ground behind

PROJECT | 2019

Review of the decision-making framework for allocating water during extreme water shortages

Supporting the NSW Government in deciding how water from the Murray- Darling system should be allocated during extreme water shortages.

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Resources

Explore Water

Contact us

t: +61 2 9514 4950
e: isf@uts.edu.au

Level 10, UTS Building 10
235 Jones Street
Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia
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Acknowledgement of Country

UTS acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the Boorooberongal people of the Dharug Nation, the Bidiagal people and the Gamaygal people, upon whose ancestral lands our university stands. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands.