The nature of reality: climate resilience in water systems

AI generated image (Gemini), prompted and iterated by Nikolai Sindorf 2026

Systems philosophy begins with the fundamental questions of ontology and epistemology: what is the nature of reality, and how do we know it? Following closely is perhaps the more important one: how shall we act? (Hammond, 2005)

Not a philosophy class. But a useful starting point, because climate adaptation and mitigation are, at their core, answers to that third question. We have gotten quite good at answering it. The problem is that we often skip the first two. We seem to know how to act, but we are less certain about which system realities are at stake. This is where resilience thinking fits in seamlessly: it is what you get when systems thinking is applied, working through all three questions before reaching for a roadmap to resilience.

Water is an exemplary gauge for this. Add water to systems thinking and you immediately grow a multitude of systems: river basins, IWRM, the food-energy-water nexus, freshwater ecosystems, WASH, nature-based solutions, irrigation, hydropower. Each framework is coherent on its own terms, and each comes with its own stakeholders. Applying a resilience lens adds the nature of reality: water carries consequences across system boundaries regardless of how we have drawn them. A drought does not stay in the river basin. It moves into food systems, energy systems, health systems. Water also carries opportunity across those same boundaries. Invest in a wetland and you improve flood buffering, groundwater recharge, and rural livelihoods in the same stroke. Any framework that treats water as contained within a single boundary will eventually yield to it. Water does not force its way. It finds one.

A step further in resilience thinking, and the one most often skipped, is that systems are not fixed. They have always been developing, in our scientific understanding and in how they behave under internal and external pressure. A system that was well understood in 1990 is not the same system today. Planning adaptation and mitigation therefore requires a system framing that treats change as a given, not an exception. That is what non-stationarity means in practice: the system you are planning for will keep changing, often in ways your models did not anticipate. Accounting for that is resilience. Ignoring it is how well-funded interventions produce fragile outcomes.

This is where the indicators come in. In an upcoming report from the Water Resilience Tracker, eight systemic dimensions of resilience are identified. They describe the structural and dynamic properties that allow a system to absorb, adapt, transform, learn, and continue functioning under change. These dimensions occur in any system, which is what makes them useful across the fragmented landscape of water frameworks. Together they provide the basis for a resilience narrative: a way of reading indicator data not as a score, but as an account of how a system is behaving. The test is simple: if an indicator cannot be expressed in terms of one of these dimensions, it is not a resilience indicator.

In the short (2 minute) movie posted below, the resilience dimensions are introduced. They are meant to interpret systemic resilience, not to define it. For the Water Resilience Tracker, this helps build an interpretative layer over a country's existing indicator frameworks, orienting the country towards resilience and facilitating co-design and ownership over national resilience indicator frameworks. In the movie, the resilience dimensions are introduced in what an AGWA colleague aptly called 'fortune cookie wisdom’. That is the right framing. This essay started with philosophy and ends with fortune cookie wisdom.

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