A View on the Future of Water Resources and Resilience: A Q&A with Adam Hosking

Water is one natural resource we all share – it shapes our lives, our communities, our ecosystems and the Earth’s climate. But managing this essential resource has never been more complicated.  

As our world faces challenges like increased water shortages, growing demand, water pollution and vulnerability to natural hazards, Jacobs works with our clients and their communities to better manage water resources and improve resilience to climate change. 

In this Q&A, we connect with Jacobs Global Director for Water Resources and Resilience Solutions, Adam Hosking. Adam leads our team of water resources and resilience practitioners who support our clients with solutions that manage water risks, protect people and assets and provide long-term resilience to climate change impacts. He shares his perspectives on the challenges that climate change is creating for the world’s water resources and how we can think differently to protect and improve the communities we serve.    

Tell us a bit about your work as Jacobs Global Director for Water Resources and Resilience Solutions, and what we offer our clients in this space.  

I lead Jacobs’ water resources solutions area, and I also support our Office of Global Climate Response and ESG on all things climate adaptation. My role is to coordinate and share our best practices in relation to water resources globally – and that includes resilience because increasingly the focus of our work is around managing and adapting to the impacts of climate change. Most of those impacts are experienced through water – too much, too little or poor quality – but our expertise also covers the growing threats from heat, wildfire and other climate hazards. Climate change is a pervasive challenge that affects every sector, whether it’s buildings, transportation, energy or health. That gives me a fantastic opportunity to work with brilliant people at Jacobs across all our market sectors and across many geographies globally. Every day, we’re solving a different challenge in a different place, different sector and for different clients. It’s the combination of our expertise in natural hazards, climate change and adaptive solution development, with the domain expertise of our sector teams, that makes our offering unique. We bring differentiated perspectives beyond just one end market.  

What are the biggest challenges in water resources today?  

Climate change is the key focus. So much of what we do in water resources is dealing with too much, too little or the wrong quality of water. So that includes challenges like flooding, coastal erosion, drought, heat, wildfires and what they mean for our built and natural environments. Water resources are fundamentally about the planning, design and delivery of projects that mitigate, and are resilient too, those impacts – all of which are being exacerbated by climate change.  

We’re seeing chronic changes with long-term heat and drought, alongside catastrophic events such as wildfires, hurricanes, and storms, that aren’t purely being caused by climate change, but are happening more frequently, in different places and with greater intensity. We’ve moved away from a world where we could broadly predict what tomorrow was going to look like, based on the past. That stationarity no longer exists and requires us to anticipate the future without being able to predict it in the same ways we could before. That creates uncertainty for clients and communities looking to manage resources and make long term investments – what do we plan and design for? There’s real skill and complexity to that, and it’s where our water resources team excels.  

How are you helping our clients to think differently as they respond to future challenges? 

I help our clients to understand the conditions they're facing today and what they might look like in the future, because there's so much uncertainty around future climate change. We can't know how much we're going to change our emissions globally and we don't have absolute certainty over the mechanisms of climate change, so it’s impossible for us to predict the future climate and what that means in terms of the environment and impacts. We’re supporting our clients to navigate that uncertainty as they make significant investments to manage the risks facing their communities, their assets, their infrastructure and the natural environment. We’re seeing that everywhere, with more and more clients taking action because climate change isn’t something we can ignore anymore. That is really driving our work across water resources. 

One specific element seeing a real uptick is coastal resilience. Coastal cities globally are experiencing the impacts of heat and rainfall, but they’re also facing sea-level rise, which is causing increasing occurrences of so-called sunny day flooding. Miami, New York City, and many other major coastal cities are facing that challenge, but they don't want to deal with it by building a big wall between them and the sea, because the sea is critical to their community and livelihoods. There’s a lot of focus now in coastal areas on how we can manage this increasing threat to our infrastructure and our communities while providing wider socio-economic and environmental benefits.    

Is there a project you’re particularly proud of? 

One example related to climate change as a driver is a project we recently completed in the U.K., the Sidmouth Amphitheater. Sidmouth is a relatively steep-sided small town on the south coast of the U.K. where, during large rainfall events, flows were being channeled down highways into the middle of the town and causing a lot of flooding to properties. We worked with the community and local authorities there to develop a solution that – instead of just putting up walls or other hard infrastructure to manage the water – took a much more innovative approach to channel the water away from town and into a natural park area where we created what’s now referred to as the amphitheater. It’s a stormwater basin which, day-to-day, is a public green space that’s used for all sorts of community events – but when it rains the water is channeled there, and captured within the basin and an underground storage tank from which it is then slowly released to reduce the peak flows that had historically caused flooding. The solution is designed to accommodate increased rainfall due to climate change while providing a fantastic community facility.  

This is a great example of how we can build resilience while creating broader benefits for communities and the environment.