Resilience to both short-term disruptions and long-term systemic changes, both anticipated and unanticipated, has become a focal point of attention in both research and policy over recent years in response to a wide range of challenges. This is equally true for the water industry as for society as a whole. With long-lived infrastructure and a traditionally conservative attitude, resilience building may be particularly challenging in the water industry. Building resilience is a multifaceted challenge, including technical, organizational, financial and governance aspects. A comprehensive approach to resilience encompasses all of these, and is therefore by definition transdisciplinary.
Actionable theoretical frameworks have been proposed in recent years, as well as many initiatives with practitioners.This session seeks to bring these together and explore how a coherent and comprehensive resilience strategy that spans multiple dimensions can be developed and operationalized for drinking water, wastewater and stormwater management. As such, contributions are solicited from both a) researchers studying system resilience in a practical or conceptual context, seeking to translate their insights into practice and b) practitioners already engaged in operationalizing resilience. In particular, transdisciplinary contributions that consider multiple dimensions and/or involve multiple stakeholders are called for. However, single-dimension contributions are also welcomed as pieces of the transdisciplinary puzzle.