What the Future Has in Store: A New Paradigm for Water Storage calls for developing and driving multi-sectoral solutions to the water storage gap, taking approaches that integrate needs and opportunities across the whole system, including natural, built, and hybrid storage, to support many instead of few, for generations to come.
Strategically significant water is also stored in or behind structures such as dams, tanks, retention ponds, farm fields, or paddies. Storage may also be a combination of natural and built (sometimes also called green and gray solutions). For example, built structures are used to accelerate the recharge of natural underground storage.
• Water storage provides three major services: improving the availability of water; reducing the impacts of floods; and regulating water flows to support energy, transportation, and other sectors. • At the same time, the regulation provided by storage can produce clean energy, needed to mitigate climate change.
Freshwater storage is at the heart of adapting to climate change, most obviously by saving water for drier times and reducing the impact of floods. Water is at the center of economic and social development; it influences whether communities are healthy places to live, good places to grow food, or have reliable clean energy.
The proposed integrated water storage planning framework is grounded in sustainable development and climate resilience, with the potential to pay dividends for people, economies, and environments for generations. Key Messages:
This paper argues that water storage should be recognised as a service rather than only a facility. More than volumes of water stored behind a dam or in a watershed, what ultimately matters is the ability to provide different services at a particular time and place with a given level of assurance.