Structured decision-making for sustainable water infrastructure planning and four future scenarios

Abstract

Water supply and wastewater infrastructures are vital for human well-being and environmental protection; they adhere to the highest standards, are expensive and long-lived. Because they are also aging, substantial planning is required. Climate and socio-economic change create large planning uncertainties and simple projections of past developments are no longer adequate. This paper presents the initial phases of a structured decision-making (SDM) procedure which is designed to increase the sustainability of water infrastructure planning and includes various stakeholders in an exemplary Swiss case study. We evaluate the SDM approach critically based on stakeholder feedback, give general recommendations and provide ample material to make it applicable to other settings. We carried out 27 interviews and two stakeholder workshops. We identified important objectives for water infrastructure planning, including all three sustainability pillars and their respective attributes (indicators, benchmarks) to measure how well the objectives are achieved. We then created strategic decision alternatives, including "business-as-usual" upgrades of the central water supply and wastewater system as well as semi- to fully decentralized alternatives. To tackle future uncertainty, we developed four socio-demographic scenarios. We used these to test the robustness of decision alternatives in a later Multi-Attribute Utility Theory analysis. Additionally, we contribute to the topical discussion of combining scenario planning with multi-criteria decision analysis and demonstrate how various scenarios can stimulate creativity when generating decision alternatives. Their internal consistency is ensured by rigorously specifying them using a strategy generation table. Our SDM procedure can be adapted to inform decisions about sustainable water infrastructures in other contexts.