Resilient water infrastructure partnerships in institutionally complex systems face challenging supply and financial risk tradeoffs

Abstract As regions around the world invest billions in new infrastructure to overcome increasing water scarcity, better guidance is needed to facilitate cooperative planning and investment in institutionally complex and interconnected water supply systems. This work combines detailed water resource system ensemble modeling with multiobjective intelligent search to explore highly uncertain infrastructure investment partnership design tradeoffs in the context of ongoing canal rehabilitation and groundwater banking in California. We highlight that severe tradeoffs can emerge between conflicting goals related to water supply deliveries, partnership size, and the underlying financial risks associated with cooperative infrastructure investments. We demonstrate how hydroclimatic variability and institutional complexity create significant uncertainty in realized water supply benefits and the potential for strong heterogeneity in partners’ financial risks that threaten infrastructure investment partnership viability. Importantly, the partnerships discovered by our multiobjective intelligent search framework are found to deliver substantially higher water supply benefits with a fraction of the financial risk compared to status quo planning processes. This work has important implications globally for efforts to use cooperative infrastructure investments to enhance the resilience and financial stability of water supply systems confronting increasing competition for scarce resources.