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Abstract Rapid adaptation is necessary to maintain, let alone expand, access to reliable, safe drinking water in the face of climate change. Existing research focuses largely on the role, priorities, and incentives of local managers to pursue adaptation strategies while mostly neglecting the role of the broader public, despite the strong public support required to fund and implement many climate adaptation plans. In this paper, we interrogate the relationship between personal experiences of household water supply impacts from extreme weather events and hazard exposure with individual concern about future supply reliability among a statewide representative sample of California households. We find that more than one-third of Californians report experiencing impacts of climate change on their household water supplies and show that these reported impacts differently influence residents’ concern about future water supply reliability, depending on the type of event experienced. In contrast, residents’ concern about future water supplies is not significantly associated with hazard exposure. These findings emphasize the importance of local managers’ attending to not only how climate change is projected to affect their water resources, but how, and whether, residents perceive these risks. The critical role of personal experience in increasing concern highlights that post-extreme events with water supply impacts may offer a critical window to advance solutions. Managers should not assume, however, that all extreme events will promote concern in the same way or to the same degree.
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Anticipating water distribution service outages from increasing temperatures
Abstract With projected temperature increases and extreme events due to climate change for many regions of the world, characterizing the impacts of these emerging hazards on water distribution systems is necessary to identify and prioritize adaptation strategies for ensuring reliability. To aid decision-making, new insights are needed into how water distribution system reliability to climate-driven heat will change, and the proactive maintenance strategies available to combat failures. To this end, we present the model Perses, a framework that joins a water distribution network hydraulic solver with reliability models of physical assets or components to estimate temperature increase-driven failures and resulting service outages in the long term. A theoretical case study is developed using Phoenix, Arizona temperature profiles, a city with extreme temperatures and a rapidly expanding infrastructure. By end-of-century under hotter futures there are projected to be 1%–5% more pump failures, 2%–5% more PVC pipe failures, and 3%–7% more iron pipe failures (RCP 4.5–8.5) than a baseline historical temperature profile. Service outages, which constitute inadequate pressure for domestic and commercial use are projected to increase by 16%–26% above the baseline under maximum temperature conditions. The exceedance of baseline failures, when compounded across a large metro region, reveals potential challenges for budgeting, management, and maintenance. An exploration of the mitigation potential of adaptation strategies shows that expedited repair times are capable of offsetting the additional outages from climate change, but will come with a cost.
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- PAR ID:
- 10376887
- Publisher / Repository:
- IOP Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 4
- ISSN:
- 2634-4505
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. 045002
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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