Sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without jeopardizing quality of life for future generations. Adaptation is adjustment of resource utilization and planning by current generations to ensure sustainability. Mitigation, for this study, narrowly refers to damage repair and restoration costs incurred after natural hazard occurrence. Climate is dynamic and ever changing. Recent observed changes in weather patterns identify that drought and intense precipitation, leading to flooding, are more likely to occur in the near future. An example dynamic probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) for flood inundation is created and applied to understand benefits to, and limitations on, PRA for sustainable water resource management. This example addresses the issue of sustainable decision making related to outdated, but historically regulatory compliant, infrastructure. The observed increase in likelihood for large floods means that many assets were designed for inapplicable conditions and are more likely to be damaged in the future. Results from this example PRA demonstrate that it provides for optimizing the degree of sustainability included in resource management and decision making. Sustainability optimization is obtained by balancing likelihood for future mitigation costs against potential cost savings garnered from present-day adaptation.

Climate change and changes to land use and land cover (LULC) both impact water resources, and they have interacting influences on the amount of water available for management and consumption. The framework for the assessment of relative risk to watershed-scale water resources from systemic changes presented in 'Projecting Climate Change Impacts to Watershed Water Resources' is used again to predict combined climate and LULC change impacts from 2011–2100 for the same semi-arid watershed in Texas. In the application, an increase in impervious area from economic development is the LULC change. It generates a 1.1 times increase in average water availability, relative to future climate trends, from increased runoff and decreased evapotranspiration.