A Risk Assessment Framework to Evaluate the Effect of Climate Change on Drinking Water Quality

Abstract: The impact of climate change on drinking water is one of the fastest-growing challenges within the water sector. Microbial contamination of drinking water has been a serious issue for decades now and will exacerbate in the coming future. Until recently the impact of climate change was only evaluated qualitatively and there has been a growing need for a quantitative risk assessment. This review covers different ways of incorporating the effects of climate change into the risk assessment framework. A comprehensive search through two databases was conducted resulting in 596 citations being screened for relevance, of which 23 were confirmed as relevant. Ten risk assessment frameworks and 3 tools obtained from this review were used for the comparative study with the Swedish QMRA tool. Data from multiple frameworks and tools were extracted to identify potential additions required for the improvement of the Swedish tool. Two approaches, i.e. data-driven and process-based, were identified and the foundation for a new framework was set up. Two pathways to implement these approaches were laid out with the first being the addition of new modules to the existing tool and the second being the use of hydrodynamic and water quality models to predict the impact of climate change on infection risks.