Incorporating the logistic regression into a decision-centric assessment of climate change impacts on a complex river system

Abstract

Climate change is a global stressor that can undermine water management policies developed with the assumption of stationary climate. While the response-surface-based assessments provided a new paradigm for formulating actionable adaptive solutions, the uncertainty associated with the stress tests poses challenges. To address the risks of unsatisfactory performances in a climate domain, this study proposed the incorporation of the logistic regression into a decision-centric framework. The proposed approach replaces the “response surfaces” of the performance metrics typically used for the decision-scaling framework with the “logistic surfaces” that describes the risk of system failures against predefined performance thresholds. As a case study, water supply and environmental reliabilities were assessed within the eco-engineering decision-scaling framework for a complex river basin in South Korea. Results showed that human-demand-only operations in the river basin could result in the water deficiency at a location requiring environmental flows. To reduce the environmental risks, the stakeholders could accept increasing risks of unsatisfactory water supply performance at the sub-basins with small water demands. This study suggests that the logistic surfaces could provide a computational efficiency to measure system robustness to climatic changes from multiple perspectives together with the risk information for decision-making processes.