Putting the economics in its place: decision making in an uncertain environment

摘要: This paper describes a decision-making process for meeting the water supply-demand balance in urban centres. This is a complex sustainability issue, with strong elements of risk and uncertainty, resource and ecological limits, economic constraints, the potential for conflict and an overarching need for the community to be engaged in the decision-making process. A worked example is used to illustrate the process, which employs several different component methods, each of which has been applied before, but not in combination. This decision-making process is likely to have relevance to a wide variety of other applications, in particular those relating to urban infrastructure.