A Workbench for Societal Transitions in Water Sensitive Cities

Strategic planning for the future management of urban water systems, in the face of pressures such as climate change and increasing water demand, presents a significant challenge. This is exacerbated by the lack of adequate support tools, particularly computational tools, for assessing the societal water system and methods for exploring future scenarios and hypothetical policy experiments. Currently most computational tools and methods are limited to predictions based on an assessment of the biophysical component of water systems and associated decision support systems are often based upon engineering derived outcomes. While this is important, it is insufficient to fully capture the complexity of the socio-technical system and therefore this paper presents the first conceptualisation of a Societal Transitions Workbench for Urban Water Systems which is a computational tool for modelling the societal component of water systems. Such tools could help our decision makers to perform rigorous thought experiments of the implications of water policies in terms of societal change and hence more comprehensively inform strategic planning through complementing the existing
engineering and biophysical based models.