Designing a sustainable water management strategy including disaster management

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary results on the application of a water management approach that includes the principles of Build Back Better (BBB) and explicitly considers the performance of a water system during the different phases of the disaster management cycle. As a case study, a small touristic island was taken that is faced with drinking water shortages due to recurring disasters (tropical storms, hurricanes, and storm surges). While water management already provides some criteria for sustainability and resilience, BBB provides an additional context to determine criteria for system performance in the different phases of the disaster cycle. Once these criteria have been established for a specific case, different solution strategies can then be analysed for a given set of scenarios through a multi-criteria analysis (MCA).