Abstract
Heat waves, drought, but also heavy rainfall events are already being felt in Germany today as a consequence of climate change. These phenomena will intensify in the future. For this reason, we expect water stress at least locally and seasonally in Germany, originally water-rich, due to potentially decreasing groundwater and surface water levels with constant or rising consumption. This may exacerbate existing conflicts between industry, water providers, private households, agriculture, and ecosystems, or create new conflicts over the protection, use, and distribution of surface and groundwater resources.
What influence will future contexts such as climate change have on water conflicts and their governance in Germany? How will future strategies and decisions of various actors – and the interplay of these policies – affect conflict situations? Which combinations of policies (policy mixes) could exacerbate or mitigate future water conflicts in different scenarios? We will explore these questions around possible future water conflicts in Germany with potentially affected as well as interested actors in an inter- and transdisciplinary approach. To make the uncertainty and complexity linked to the issue tangible, semi-qualitative system analysis is applied. We have chosen cross-impact balance analysis (CIB) because it supports both, the construction of qualitative future scenarios as well as policy design. We apply CIB, and this is an innovation, in the form of participatory modeling and develop a serious game (web application) that supports actors in anticipating conflicts and forming coherent strategies under future uncertainty. Currently, three modular case studies are carried out: Module A ‘conflicting objectives in a river basin’ (focus on industry, urban development, and reservoirs); module B ‘conflicts of irrigation’ (focus on rising water demand of viticulture, field cultivation and urban green); module C ‘conflicts in large-scale mining projects’ (focus on operation and flooding of open-cast coal mining in a transboundary setting). In all three cases, we develop qualitative models of possible future water conflicts together with local and external experts. In a second step we use these models as a serious gaming tool to illustrate the consequences of one's own and others' decisions. This supports the development of conflict-reducing strategies and policy mixes that are robust to a range of possible future developments.
Expected results comprise, first, three modular and participatory CIB models of future water conflicts in Germany i) representing possible context scenarios as well as possible strategies and options for action of different actors, and ii) uncovering the extent and nature of linkages between affected parties. The play sessions with experts will result in potential policy mixes for the investigated conflict fields under different scenarios (policy-mix scenarios). Second, we will prepare a shareable workshop version of the co-designed web application for this use of CIB for local and external experts and academic teaching. Finally, we will carry out cross-case system analyses on future water conflicts in Germany and on possible strategies for conflict mitigation under different scenarios of climate change and other uncertain contexts.
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