An integrative regional resilience framework for the changing urban water paradigm

•This work develops a bottom-up framework to identify local and regional resiliency-enhancing strategies for water utilities.•We identify flexible metrics that reflect local criteria and preferences to help understand water management opportunities.•We introduce the Gini-Simpson index as a metric of water supply diversity and an indicator of water supply resiliency.•A case study in the Bay Area highlights opportunities for collaborative management in the implementation of adaptation strategies.

The water sector is going through a paradigm shift. Many communities are incorporating decentralized solutions such as water reuse and recycling, stormwater capture, and demand-side management in order to address both short-term and long-term water resources challenges due to population increase, economic growth, intensified climate variability, as well as environmental concerns. For these projects to be sustainable, local characteristics including social and institutional contexts must be incorporated in the planning process. This paper presents a flexible and bottom-up framework that facilitates integration of such characteristics in evaluation of various water resource management strategies. It incorporates various locally-driven factors such as water use efficiency, stress on existing supplies, and adaptation capacity potential, to identify how various local and regional solutions affect resiliency at the utility and regional levels. Rather than defining top-down resilience standards, this framework incorporates quantitative and qualitative assessments that can help decision-makers tailor adaptation measures to the needs and opportunities of a given location or community. A case study application of the framework in the San Francisco Bay Area highlights how community-level characteristics can be used to identify opportunities and adaptation strategies in order to enhance both local and collective water resource resiliency.