Defining the Role of Water Resources Systems Analysis in a Changing Future

Historical references for WRSA define a set of methods, tools, and approaches for the field (Loucks et al. 1981; Maass et al. 1962). Given changing research foci and the introduction of new techniques, the panel discussants provided updated views on how the field can be defined:

Overall, WRSA has built on classical operations research approaches and added new techniques that recognize that problems are affected by uncertainty and nonstationarity, involve multiple stakeholders and many objectives, and have a strong policy focus while being ill defined and wicked (Brown et al. 2015; Haasnoot et al. 2013; Herman et al. 2015; Hjorth and Madani 2014; Lund 2015; Madani 2010).

Another aspect of defining the WRSA field relates to engineering discipline: systems engineers versus civil engineers. Civil engineering lends itself to the broad thinking that is required to solve a systems problem, since ASCE’s Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge includes public policy, ethics, sustainability, and social sciences in addition to mathematics and natural sciences (ASCE 2008). Effectively teaching these broader topics of public policy and sustainability in engineering curriculum often requires detailed case studies and/or project-based learning that promote higher order thinking (e.g., analyzing, evaluating, and creating in Bloom’s taxonomy) (Bielefeldt 2013). Panelists also noted that beyond a traditional civil engineering focus, water is interrelated with culture, an emotional response, and a sense of place (Jacobs and Buijs 2011), lending itself to interdisciplinary inquiry.

The WRSA community within EWRI should support a unified curriculum for the field (Kirshen et al. 2004). In addition to understanding the role of WRSA in the public planning of projects and how to communicate with stakeholders (Lund 2012), a WRSA education should include law, economics, and other social sciences, with enough detail such that students in the program can be conversant in multiple fields. Effective WRSA should bring knowledge resources to bear on real-world problems and make actionable results that get implemented in the real world. One effective means of doing so is in solving problems from other similarly related fields to gain new ideas about technical calculations, such as fragility curves to evaluate the performance of green stormwater infrastructure (William and Stillwell 2017) that can also be applied to dams and levees.

Publishing research is a major component of the graduate education experience; in academia, a person’s number of publications and their impact are considered concrete measures of research quality and productivity. Students concerned with future faculty application packages and advisers seeking to build careers both lead to heightened pressure that can result in the consideration of newer journals that are not as established as others. However, the field should continue to maintain the quality of scholarship and make sure that work is mature when it is shared in publication. Moreover, it would be useful to include measures of research uptake into tenure and promotion packages, in addition to publication counts. WRSA researchers should also be involved in interdisciplinary efforts such as the increased focus of hydrology on coupled human and natural systems (Vogel et al. 2015) and the food-energy-water nexus (Bazilian et al. 2011). Such interdisciplinary activities can serve to raise awareness of the importance of human beings in the hydrologic cycle and for communicating WRSA and hydrology to the public. Another important concept for WRSA education is the value of first-hand experiences. One panelist explained that students gained a great appreciation for the potential impact of WRSA when they traveled to a flooding location and were able to comfort members of the public there; such experiential learning activities have been shown to be effective beyond pedagogy that relies solely on lectures (Mintz et al. 2014). Overall, WRSA educators should promote active learning (Prince 2004), making sure to emphasize critical thinking skills, and emphasize learning about real-world problems and how to formulate approaches around those problems rather than just giving a set of predefined problems that require less critical thinking. Rosenberg et al. (2017) reviewed recent efforts to survey WRSA educators on current curricula, with the goal of providing such a holistic unified education plan for the field.

Beyond education of students in WRSA, the field also has a responsibility to outreach to the broader public, such as how to engineer solutions to systems undergoing change. Within these systems, it is useful to explore expectations between what science can provide versus what people expect. Scientists focus on a deliberative, iterative process of scientific inquiry, whereas the public often calls for solid proof that is static and definitive (Oreskes 2004). Engineering education focuses on teaching students to communicate using numbers with quantified uncertainty ranges. Training in public policy, meanwhile, focuses on communication with anecdotes to make the main points relatable and real. Future WRSA practitioners should be trained to blend the quantitative- and narrative-based traditions, and also be trained to recognize sources of conflict, especially in negotiating solutions in the public sphere.

WRSA does not always seek to provide a single definitive answer to public water planning problems but instead offers systematic approaches and a wealth of information and learning about problem properties (Liebman 1976; Maknoon and Burges 1978). Too much information, though, can seem inessential or overwhelming, leading to a concept known as bounded rationality where humans simplify decision making by using only a subset of available information for complex decisions (Simon 1982). Therefore, we can more effectively influence practical applications by directly engaging with practitioners and stakeholders to incorporate their needs and interests into our research agendas. This approach follows the model of research termed coproduction by Callon (1999). There are efforts and some successes at coproduction, sometimes termed participatory research (Palmer et al. 2013; Smith et al. 2017; Voinov and Bousquet 2010), but more effort to bring practitioners and stakeholders into the research process is needed.

Should a WRSA analyst actually choose a preferred alternative in a planning analysis, or simply provide information that can inform the stakeholders’ work? The problem formulation for a WRSA study is critical to be able to answer this question.

WRSA problem formulations include the decisions, objectives, and constraints within an optimization, the simulation modeling and its complexity, and the analysis tools to process data. There have been several commentaries that argue for flexible problem formulations (Lund 2012; Reed and Kasprzyk 2009; Rosenberg and Madani 2014), but have WRSA researchers and practitioners risen to the challenge? The problem context should define the appropriate tools to be used, including having a right-sized model that is just complex enough to capture the governing dynamics; new problems can also inspire innovative methods to be developed that have not been seen before. There is an infinite number of different problem formulations that could be defined for any one particular WRSA problem, and because of this unboundedness, there is a zero probability that a particular problem is the true and most accurate problem. Thus, problem solvers should be concerned with whether or not their problem formulation suffers from too much irreversibility and lock in. For example, building a large infrastructure project cannot be easily undone, so WRSA users should avoid situations where the problem formulation has locked them into too many of those types of decisions. There is an argument that a WRSA problem is never truly solved, but rather a given solution is simply accepted and implemented—an important point to make to WRSA students. In fact, as more case studies and real-world context are brought into the classroom, students will be transformed from thinking that extra information in a word problem is distressing because it is not used in the solution of a problem, to understanding that the real world is messy and that solutions to WRSA problems are hardly ever absolute. In fact, students should understand that the information from a WRSA analysis has a finite shelf life; the information should be sufficient to provide insight about the system and timely enough to inform decision making.

Another important aspect of the WRSA analyst’s role is understanding next steps: what to do when the initial analysis is complete. If the analyst completes a project and presents it to the stakeholders, will they implement it as designed originally? By one definition, a WRSA application is a success if the modeling work ended up informing the decision that was made, not necessarily dictating all the parameters of the final decision. Monitoring and ex post evaluation are not often done in WRSA projects, but they are critical to inform future studies and refine the WRSA techniques. Part of this iterative evaluation is done with long-term relationships between consulting engineers and their clients, but in such relationships the clients should promote more retrospective studies to evaluate previous work. Journals should encourage this type of work as well, especially when it provides the societal and regulatory context. Such monitoring and evaluation is also important because the hydrologic context often dictates the usefulness of the WRSA analysis; for example, utilities will often focus on drought conditions, but then be flummoxed by wet periods that might occur thereafter.

While it is important for WRSA to have a clear identity given its role in creating methods for solving problems as well as contributing to the sustainability of water resources, the field should also consider its accountability. Because WRSA is so focused on problem solving methods, it is easy for researchers especially to get distracted from monitoring results, ignoring how the recipients of information react, or how new techniques compare to the needs and capabilities of practitioners. It might be less important how WRSA is defined than that it produces better water resources systems outcomes.

If it can be shown that WRSA has indeed had a positive contribution to society, the field should provide evidence of this contribution [especially building on older retrospectives such as Rogers and Fiering (1986)]. For example, we could publish a review of WRSA success stories, and important failures, and what scholars have learned from such activities—both within research as well as rather real-world implementation.

While reviewing the definitions of WRSA provided during the discussion, it was clear that the field is a truly interdisciplinary one, which allows for a broad, holistic view of water resources issues especially given uncertainty and change. Thus, we should also formalize the inclusion of other fields within the WRSA educational process, and make sure to build bridges to other disciplines to foster more productive work in the future.

This editorial would not have been possible without the panel discussion at the EWRI 2017 Congress. The panelists were Soroosh Sorooshian, Daene McKinney, David Ford, Ashlynn Stillwell, and Joseph Kasprzyk. Kaveh Madani facilitated the discussion and Rebecca Smith was an audience participant. We would like to thank all the attendees and panelists for participating, both this year and in previous panels. The views expressed herein are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not reflect the views of funding agencies. We also acknowledge the comments of peer reviewers that have strengthened the editorial.