Water management is increasingly challenged by pressures such as population growth, sea level rise and climate change. Given the uncertainties about the future, how do you create a sustainable water management plan? Different stakeholders have different perspectives and priorities. How do you gain insight into this and create a plan that can count on broad support? Only by engaging stakeholders in exploring different adaptation pathways together can you prepare for an uncertain future.
On the 28 June we offer you some hands on experience with stakeholder engagement in the field of integrated flood risk management. We’ll make use of the “wisdom of the collective” approach, in which local stakeholders team up with their colleagues in architecture, planning, science and the community, to develop their own plans. This process can be facilitated by tools, which help you to create a common understanding of the system, as well as the possible solutions and their effects on each of the stakeholders. They help identify what the priorities and show-stoppers are for the different stakeholders. Buy-in from all stakeholders from an early stage can lead to very effective and out-of-the-box solutions that can be implemented in record time. An example of this is the Room for the River program in the Netherlands (Room for the River), in which an entire suburb was relocated to improve the overall flood risk of the town of Nijmegen.
The workshop is run in 2 parallel sessions. Both workshop are interactive and use a mix of tools and software to have you full engaged. We will have access to the state of the art training room at the Cube, thanks to our QUT event partners.
- Smart Scanner for Water Resilient cities, where will make use of a collection of stakeholder engagement tools to find better solutions together. We’ll initially take a closer look at real rainfall data for a flood event to discuss and understand how such an event happens in real life, looking at aspects like speed, direction, intensity, magnitude, timing and location. You will also be shown how to access, view and download data, with an emphasis on the available radar rainfall data, by making use of the HydroNET RainWatch application. This rainfall information is the input of a pluvial flooding scenario in the suburb of West End. With the Smart Scanner, we will continue to analyse the flash-flood event caused by this heavy rainfall, as well as investigate how different measures can alleviate the resulting floods. We finalize the session by investigating how different stakeholders can help or hinder to put the selected measures into effect.
- Sustainable Delta, where we’ll tackle the serious topic of water management with a serious game. You’ll experience first-hand what’s it like to develop and implement a Sustainable Water Management Plan for the coming 100 years in a fictional but very realistic setting. A game allows all involved parties to come together for a discussion within a safe environment. It’s only a game after all. Play with the different stakeholders around the table, or use role play techniques to give a voice to all involved parties. Are the ideas and wishes around the table really so different or can they complement each other? Together we can find ways to make smarter investment decisions given the different requirements and an uncertain future. This game has been played numerous times in different setting all over the world. Players feedback generally includes the realisation on how they aimed to be proactive, but in the end seemed to only react to events and how experiencing uncertainty due to climate variability in the game opened their eyes.
Please indicate your preferred workshop when you register, you can finalise your choice on the day. Morning tea will be offered.