Mistaking Instrumentation for Resilience: A Water-wise Alternative
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Despite the overwhelmingly positive feedback from other participants, I left the EU Water Resilience Forum (Brussels, 8 December) with a strong sense of distance. Though I identify as a broadly-oriented water professional, I rarely felt so disconnected from water resilience discussions as in these rooms. The dominant narratives leaned heavily toward technological solutions: smart systems, sensors, optimization, efficiency, innovation pipelines, digital twins. These are all important issues, yet the more the presentations narrowed to technical sophistication, the more I wondered whether we are mistaking instrumentation for resilience.
This technological focus at the forum was justified by the "Water Efficiency First" principle that underpins the EU Resilience Framework: a collective EU objective to improve overall water efficiency by at least 10% by 2030. In an earlier essay, I wrote about my concerns with placing too much emphasis on water efficiency. To me, that focus is like the tail wagging the dog. Efficiency is not a neutral concept. There are many ways to become "efficient," and not all of them make a system more resilient. In a climate-altered future, a system can be brilliantly optimized for normal conditions and still be fragile under extremes, if not more fragile.
Enter Donella Meadows' essay on system leverage (1999). Though dated, her arguments remain current, if not increasingly relevant. She distinguished between low-leverage interventions, such as tweaking numbers and parameters, and higher-leverage ones that reshape rules, goals, and paradigms. Her point is simple: we can spend effort on what is easiest to measure while leaving deeper drivers of system behaviour untouched. That observation is highly relevant to the discourse at the forum and the overall framing of the EU Water Resilience Framework.
A technocratic approach often defaults to low-leverage moves: install more sensors, digitize networks, tighten controls, chase percentage savings. These steps can deliver real gains. But they can also pull us toward fragile optimization. Meadows reminds us that buffers stabilize systems. In water systems, buffers are not only reservoirs. They include aquifers and soils that store moisture; wetlands and floodplains that slow floods and recharge groundwater; emergency interconnections; backup power and critical spares; maintainable infrastructure; and people who can act under pressure. These are typically not captured very well under singular efficiency targets.
A second, related observation from the forum was the relatively high representation (in both presentations and attendance) of corporate delegates and scientists focused on distribution networks, metering, valves, equipment, digitization, and dashboards. In several talks, they expressed their need for financial incentives to make the EU more water resilient. If "incentives" becomes the default answer, it risks narrowing the agenda once again: resilience framed as something we do only when subsidized, rather than as a shared necessity under a changing climate. This is why I believe the Water Resilience Framework should be seen as a paradigm shift rather than a technical programme. A paradigm shift changes what we prioritize, what we fund, what we measure, and what we treat as legitimate success. It moves us beyond a "water-smart resilient economy" framing (though useful) toward something broader: a water-wise resilient society.
Yet multinationals can contribute meaningfully to resilience when properly oriented toward systemic resilience goals rather than narrow efficiency gains. At AGWA, we are now engaging with multinationals to help frame their water resilience strategies. Through our Water Resilience Tracker, we primarily work with the public sector across different countries, where we recognize the critical roles that the private sector plays in water systems: through water use, value chains, stewardship, and adaptation. Many corporations have engaged for years around water risk and collective action; what is changing now is our combined ambition toward resilience.
Our work with corporate partners aims to incorporate their experience, tools, and investments into holistic, systemic water resilience. We collaborate with companies that want to take action: investing in shared buffers, improving preparedness and information-sharing, and supporting governance that can coordinate trade-offs fairly, where AGWA is engaged as a critical partner. Together with our public and now private partnerships, we are slowly shifting the paradigm toward water resilience.
Nikolai Sindorf
Delft, Netherlands
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