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This MCC paper explores what resilience really means for water systems, and why the UK can learn from US tools and case studies as pressures from climate change and ageing assets intensify. Discover actionable strategies to strengthen planning, regulation, and long-term service reliability.
Starting from themes raised by the Independent Water Commission (IWC), the paper frames resilience as the ability to absorb shocks (like droughts and floods) while adapting to long-run challenges. It identifies shared UK/US issues, ageing infrastructure, fragmentation, and extreme weather, and explores US case studies (including consolidation approaches and more hands-on supervisory regulation) that could inform UK policy and regional planning. The note emphasises that resilience must be tackled at system and governance levels, not treated as a narrow technical afterthought.
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