Project description

Climate change and socio-economic growth are projected to severely challenge river basin development worldwide and require robust planning solutions. This is especially true in the Southeast Asian monsoon region, where large water storage systems play a key role for securing water, energy, and food to a rapidly growing and changing society. Such systems require robust and adaptive operations capable of coping with high intra- and inter-annual hydroclimatic variability and an increasing frequency of extreme events. In addition, they have to face multi-sector changing demands across multiple time scales, from daily operations to strategic river basin development. In this context, the goal is to develop a framework that integrates climate scenarios (including extreme climate events), water demand scenarios and a high-resolution hydrological model (which takes infrastructure into account) to produce accurate projections of water availability. The projections include water management policies optimised by means of a strategic model, against which to assess sustainability and robustness of future river basin development plans. The focus is on the Red River catchment, a large transboundary river basin, where conflicts between different water uses and negative impacts on long-term sustainability under the combined pressures of increasing water and energy demand and climate change increase. In particular, extreme weather events are expected to become more frequent and extreme. KIT IMK-TRO will create a catalogue of past and future extreme precipitation events under different climate scenarios.