Scenario development for water resource planning and management: A review

This paper reviews current research on scenario development in water resource management. We provide an overview of existing techniques, highlight any limitations, and discuss future research directions to improve scenario development practices for water resource planning. In water management, scenarios are used to account for uncertainties associated with climatic, socio-economic, and management conditions that affect the performance of water resource systems. These uncertainties affect future water supply, water demand and management strategy. Several water-related scenarios with qualitative and quantitative techniques are reviewed against a general scenario development procedure. Although the reviewed literature demonstrates that scenario development is an effective tool to deal with uncertain future water systems, two limitations of applied quantitative techniques were identified: (i) the need for extending discrete scenarios to continuous scenarios to more completely cover future conditions, and (ii) the need for introducing probabilistic scenarios to explicitly quantify uncertainties. These issues can be addressed using existing techniques from information theory and statistics, pointing the way forward for scenario development practices in water resource planning and management.

► We present a general procedure for developing water scenarios. ► Techniques are reviewed for each scenario development step. ► Two limitations of the existing scenario development studies are demonstrated. ► A probabilistic framework is proposed to address the limitations and point a way for future scenario development practice.