From the water safety plan to the water cycle safety plan - EPAL´s experience

Abstract

With its participation in PREPARED - Enabling Change, EPAL aims to demonstrate the feasibility of the innovative Water Cycle Safety Plan (WCSP) framework approach to climate change related risk management. The demonstration was applied to Lisbon´s water supply system and allowed the company to diagnose to what extent EPAL´s existing Water Safety Plan can be integrated as a System Safety Plan within the wider range of WCSP. Conclusions were that EPAL benefited from being integrated in the broader WCSP team and from broadening the scope of WSP aims. The main difficulties arose from the need to find a scale of consequences suitable for all the parties involved and from the fact that the upstream stakeholder in the river basin, where major interactions were found to happen, did not participate in the demo. The tools developed in order to support the risk identification, analysis and treatment phases proved to be useful, despite lacking a user-friendly interface. Overall, we can conclude that if the concept of the WCSP is to be fully implemented, it will definitely become a powerfull tool manage shared risks in the water cycle in an integrated manner.