The Currency of Resilience

One of the oldest truisms of the past century, at least in water, is that if we don’t measure something, we can’t manage it.

As a saying, that phrase fails spectacularly. Humans manage lots of things without measuring them and we always have. Even water. And often when we have quantitative measurements, we may place too much faith them, blindly following the last cell in a column in a spreadsheet. Sometimes you need to look outside and see what is happening. Just because you have a number doesn’t mean it’s the right number, it’s an accurate number you can have faith in, or even that you measured the right object (or the correct thing in the right way).

As an example, a big insight along these lines for water came in the 1990s, when a group of scientists and practitioners said that ecosystems like rivers and lakes don’t think in terms of quantity and quality. They “operate” in terms of timing. The concept of the natural flow regime is such a powerful idea that captures how quantity and quality of water resources normally derives from seasonal, normally predictable variations in flows. Trying to operate a river like a valve will always fail. And since the water that goes through valves often comes from rivers, we should bring a flows perspective into our engineering decision making as well.

We’re still making slow progress in trying to bring concepts like timing and flows into water management, but big changes always take time.

I’d like to suggest a new truism: we can’t manage what we don’t see.

Mostly, we don’t see resilience even if we (or maybe just I?) use the term constantly. We have a variety of proxies we use, but mostly proxies without a lot of depth or consideration.

Right now, we’re mobilizing a team to take some bold steps: to propose that we start to measure resilience. Many global and national institutions are asking for this information; many people are looking at traditional measures of water security and asking, “Where is the climate info?” And many climate security people are realizing that most of their drivers are water related.

Indeed, I’ve come to believe that the evidence is very strong that water is the currency of resilience — what we need to spend in order to achieve effective resilience. From that perspective, water quantity and quality (and even flows) are insufficient proxies. We need to see resilience.

These are not theoretical constructs. Within three years, I predict billions in investments will be guided by such measurements, including some of our propositions.

Provoked? Interested? Email us! And expect to hear more soon.

John Matthews

Corvallis, Oregon, USA