Conference Agenda

Goal: Explore the critical role of stakeholder and policymakers engagement in communicating and managing uncertainties in environmental decision-making. Assess and discuss structured frameworks such as scenathons, robust participatory methods and serious games to enhance co- creation and actionable solutions in water resources governance.

Background. Water is a fundamental resource with multiple uses ranging from basic human need for hydration and hygiene, to its economic use for food, energy, industrial manufacturing, and service provision. Population growth and changing living standards are heavily affecting the demand of this natural resource, while climate change and lack of infrastructural investment constrain water supply and increase its volatility. Agriculture is the most water-intensive sector with 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, and the sector that generates the least value added from the resource (EUR of income per m3). Thus, agricultural water reallocations offer the greatest potential to enhance security (food, water, and human) and economic well-being.

Planning for sustainable, efficient and equitable agricultural water reallocations is becoming increasingly challenging due to climatic and socioeconomic change, which lead to a context of deep uncertainty, a situation where scientists, stakeholders, and policymakers do not know or cannot agree on the external context of the system and its evolution, how systems work and interrelate, or how to value the desirability of alternative and potentially conflicting outcomes.

Under deep uncertainty, priority should be given to the identification of resilience policies that deliver a satisfactory performance under most plausible futures, and enable recovery where unforeseen futures realize.

Effective communication of uncertainty during stakeholders and policymakers engagement can enhance model and data credibility, create awareness on key vulnerabilities, and build consensus, and is thus critical for fostering policies that enable environmental and socioeconomic resilience. This session aims to present and discuss recent advances in uncertainty modeling (sensitivity analysis, ensembles, grandensembles) and its communication through innovative stakeholder engagement processes (serious games, scenathons, field experiments, other) towards the design and eventual implementation of feasible agricultural water reallocation policies that enhance resilience.

Structure of the Session. The policy session will be divided into two parts. In the first part of the session, the chairperson will introduce the topic, presenting the main types of uncertainty related to water resources modeling and challenges in uncertainty communication. Speakers will then expose methodological advancements and gaps related to uncertainty quantification and their communication to stakeholders and policymakers. Presentations will last fifteen minutes each, and 20 minutes of Q&A will follow. This introductory part will frame the second part of the session, in which a roundtable will be opened to debate the pros and cons of the models/methodologies/instruments for communicating uncertainty presented by the speakers and explore their transferability. The roundtable will be open for discussion with all the attendees (30 minutes). Chairpersons will close the session by wrapping up the key findings of the discussion.