Adaptation to Climate Change in Basins Within the Context of Water-Energy-Food Nexus

• Main Author: Palma, Vicente Gabriel Jander
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2021
• Subjects: Climate Change; Floods; Water Resources Management; Water rights; Water shortages
• ISBN: 9798762118569

Climate change effects implicate uncertainty over different areas, one of them being water resources, and the different productive activities associated. Moreover, many regulations, agreements and infrastructure works were developed without considering climate change impacts over temperatures, precipitation levels and flow availability; so it is necessary to rethink these tools for a more efficient water use under a given regulatory system and diverse productive interests. The decision of which adaptation strategy must be implemented to maintain a productive system’s performance in a Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus basin must be addressed, considering the balance between productive water use and environmental maintenance of the ecosystem. Recently, the Maule basin in Chile has been affected by water shortage events, generating negative repercussions over crop production and water rights permissibility, raising concerns about the future events. This study presents a modelation of the Maule basin and the impacts of certain climate change scenarios over it, alongside a comparative analysis of adaptative strategies implementation; both from a Supply (Reservoir Operation) and Demand (Irrigation Efficiency and Water Rights) Side Water Management. The respective basin modelling, including the physical, hydrological, productive and regulatory features, is done with the PYWR computational tool; alongside the WEAP software for water runoff representations. Additionally, a Multi Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA) is used, known as NSGA-III, to generate optimal portfolios of different articulated strategies; and therefore different alternatives that adapt to the proposed objectives. Results show that there is a trade-off between environmental and productive goals, however, under an integral approach, the productive agents can incur in a win-win scenario if the multi-objective analysis consider both hydropower and crop production in a WEF nexus type basin.