Adaptive Pathways: Creating Resilient Strategies and Plans

The water sector develops long term strategies for deeply uncertain futures. With increasing discourse on resilience, climate adaptation and technological disruption, amongst other uncertainty, it is becoming accepted that a traditional deterministic approach to planning for a single future is fundamentally flawed. Planners and decision makers are grappling with a common issue: how to become resilient? A study for Melbourne Water into Planning for Uncertainty recommended Adaptive Pathways Planning as a best-practice approach for creating robust and flexible long term strategies that can respond to deep uncertainty. This paper explores the Adaptive Pathways Planning approach, drawing on guidelines developed for the water industry (GHD and Trioss Global, 2017) and recent applications of the approach.