Preventing Shocks and Stresses from becoming Crises: The Water Resilience Assessment Framework (WRAF)

The Water Resilience Assessment Framework (WRAF) is a high-level framework that seeks to prevent shocks and stresses from becoming crises. It aims to facilitate a shared understanding of water system resilience and allow practitioners to develop common measurable goals and outcomes for stakeholder and resilience planning. The WRAF guides users through a process of visualizing the system, developing a resilience strategy, testing the resilience strategy and evaluating the outcomes in order to build system-wide resilience. The WRAF makes resilience a predictable outcome in an unpredictable world, which is increasingly important as climate change continues to alter how we make water management decisions. This session will seek to explore the bounds of resilience thinking and seek input on how to continue to grow and foster resilience.

The session will introduce the framework and how it can be used to build resilience and support climate change adaptation goals. A panel of cross-sectoral experts will further elaborate on the gap that the WRAF fills and how they would use it in their own work. Concluding remarks will focus on the path forward and a call to action