Groundwater Videos

NCGRT Program 5 leader Professor Tony Jakeman's keynote lecture at the SIMULTECH Conference 2012

Modelling and simulation are becoming increasingly important for addressing today’s environmental problems. Many of these, such as assessing the impacts of climate change and the sustainability of groundwater systems, are messy or wicked problems. These are defined by there being multiple stakeholders and decision makers with competing and conflicting goals, and where the systems of interest are complex - being social, economic, and ecological - and are subject to a range of uncertainties caused by limited data, information and knowledge. Modellers can nevertheless play a key role in resolving and providing support for clarifying decision options for managing environmental issues. Indeed the more messy the problem the greater need for a proper process of ‘integrated assessment.’ In this process modellers undertake integration in several ways. They can help to frame the right problem, identify and include the key stakeholders, map out the system interactions, select the appropriate modelling paradigm(s) for analyzing consequences of policy changes and other influences, manage uncertainties and communicate them. This talk will illustrate the effectiveness of integrated assessment and decision support using our experiences in the water resources sector, provide some guidance on the process and lay out some of the challenges ahead.

Presented at the following Conference: SIMULTECH, International Conference on Simulation and Modeling Methodologies, Technologies and Applications
July, 2012
Rome, Italy