Foresight and Integration

Can we develop future water scenarios to assess social and technical solutions to address the challenges faced?

The research aims to understand the long term drivers of change, including their impacts and interactions, to present opportunities for the development of tailored solutions to water provision.

The theme has three main activities:

There is a lack of structural foresight in the water sector beyond 20 years; building upon existing national scenarios and future studies, a set of representative water future scenarios will be developed. These scenarios will consider the drivers, emerging technologies, risks and opportunities to the water system over 20-100 years. These will complement the nearer term analyses and research roadmaps being considered by the Water Innovation hub and provide alternative contexts for considering tailored pathways.

Roadmapping of modelling and integration activities will be undertaken in close collaboration with stakeholder partners through the Water Innovation Hub. This will develop a research agenda for integrated modelling in the water sector.

Addressing the top priorities from the roadmapping exercise, an initial modelling toolkit will be developed to consider and test new approaches, technologies, and data from the wider Twenty65 programme. This will be designed in collaboration with end-users to enable solutions to be considered and assessed in an integrated way with the future water scenarios already developed. As the scenarios are already established, it will allow the consideration of multiple solutions to be used simultaneously i.e. a silver basket of solutions.

Over the longer term we will work with the wider academic, government and industry community to extend the work in Twenty65 to deliver the roadmap vision for water modelling.