Western US regions are particularly vulnerable to future climate-induced environmental changes, given their scarce water resources and heavy reliance on thermoelectric power generation. As climate-related environmental events become more common, water and electricity managers will face challenges when handling vulnerabilities in the interdependent water-electricity systems. These vulnerabilities may arise because existing infrastructures were designed for a demand profile that was significantly different from what is expected in coming decades, and because the institutions that manage the systems do not yet have anticipatory governance structures that would enable them to proactively address the future. This project will develop a framework for assessing coupled water and electricity infrastructure-institution vulnerability to future climate events.

There is a need to better understand how the governing of water and electricity services from local to regional scales can be coordinated to proactively reduce future vulnerability. This project will develop (1) a cross-scale model of the water and electricity systems in the Southwest, (2) an institutional assessment of infrastructure managers, decision makers, and policies that control or impact each component of the water and electricity infrastructure, and (3) an extreme climate vulnerability assessment that joins physical infrastructure characteristics with the institutional processes that govern them. With this coupled infrastructure-institutional vulnerability assessment (4) a learning game will be developed for infrastructure managers to both teach them about the vulnerabilities and help them understand how their institutional structures can be proactively changed to improve system-wide resilience. Through a series of workshops with infrastructure managers (5) the game will be tested through visioning and scenario analysis exercises. New knowledge and methods will be created for assessing water and electricity systems that acknowledges that failure can propagate through complex systems and can start with vulnerabilities in both physical and institutional infrastructure. The project will explore how game-based learning approaches can provide researchers and managers with knowledge of the complex system and an understanding of the strategies for creating anticipatory governance for a climate-impacted future.