scholarly journals Managing hydroclimatic risks in federal rivers: a diagnostic assessment

Author(s):  
Dustin Garrick ◽  
Lucia De Stefano ◽  
Fai Fung ◽  
Jamie Pittock ◽  
Edella Schlager ◽  
...  

Hydroclimatic risks and adaptive capacity are not distributed evenly in large river basins of federal countries, where authority is divided across national and territorial governments. Transboundary river basins are a major test of federal systems of governance because key management roles exist at all levels. This paper examines the evolution and design of interstate water allocation institutions in semi-arid federal rivers prone to drought extremes, climatic variability and intensified competition for scarce water. We conceptualize, categorize and compare federal rivers as social–ecological systems to analyse the relationship between governance arrangements and hydroclimatic risks. A diagnostic approach is used to map over 300 federal rivers and classify the hydroclimatic risks of three semi-arid federal rivers with a long history of interstate allocation tensions: the Colorado River (USA/Mexico), Ebro River (Spain) and Murray–Darling River (Australia). Case studies review the evolution and design of water allocation institutions. Three institutional design trends have emerged: adoption of proportional interstate allocation rules; emergence of multi-layered river basin governance arrangements for planning, conflict resolution and joint monitoring; and new flexibility to adjust historic allocation patterns. Proportional allocation rules apportion water between states based on a share of available water, not a fixed volume or priority. Interstate allocation reform efforts in the Colorado and Murray–Darling rivers indicate that proportional allocation rules are prevalent for upstream states, while downstream states seek reliable deliveries of fixed volumes to increase water security. River basin governance arrangements establish new venues for multilayered planning, monitoring and conflict resolution to balance self governance by users and states with basin-wide coordination. Flexibility to adjust historic allocation agreements, without risk of defection or costly court action, also provides adaptive capacity to manage climatic variability and shifting values. Future research should develop evidence about pathways to adaptive capacity in different classes of federal rivers, while acknowledging limits to transferability and the need for context-sensitive design.

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Umesh Kumar Singh ◽  
Balwant Kumar

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emission is altering the global hydrological cycle due to change in rainfall pattern and rising temperature which is responsible for alteration in the physical characteristics of river basin, melting of ice, drought, flood, extreme weather events and alteration in groundwater recharge. In India, water demand for domestic, industrial and agriculture purposes have already increased many folds which are also influencing the water resource system. In addition, climate change has induced the surface temperature of the Indian subcontinent by 0.48 ºC in just last century. However, Ganges–Brahmaputra–Meghna (GBM) river basins have great importance for their exceptional hydro-geological settings and deltaic floodplain wetland ecosystems which support 700 million people in Asia. The climatic variability like alterations in precipitation and temperature over GBM river basins has been observed which signifies the GBM as one of the most vulnerable areas in the world under the potential impact of climate change. Consequently, alteration in river discharge, higher runoff generation, low groundwater recharge and melting of glaciers over GBM river basin could be observed in near future. The consequence of these changes due to climate change over GBM basin may create serious water problem for Indian sub-continents. This paper reviews the literature on the historical climate variations and how climate change affects the hydrological characteristics of different river basins.


Author(s):  
D. M. G. dela Torre ◽  
P. K. A. dela Cruz ◽  
R. P. Jose ◽  
N. B. Gatdula ◽  
A. C. Blanco

Abstract. This study utilized the Analytic Hierarchical Process and spatial analysis using various datasets to produce sub-provincial vulnerability maps with 20 km resolution. Five (5) indicators for exposure, four (4) for sensitivity and seven (7) for adaptive capacity were selected and weighted using aggregated rankings from twenty-three (23) experts. Based on these indicators, gridded maps of exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and vulnerability were produced. Using river basins as the unit of analysis, the Pampanga River Basin was determined to be the most vulnerable, followed by the Agus River Basin, having the highest sensitivity, and Buayan River Basin, having the lowest adaptive capacity. These areas have large agricultural regions and river systems with high flooding risk. Coastal regions in southern Mindanao and eastern Visayas were also highly vulnerable to flooding. High poverty rates with high dependence on agricultural incomes and low adaptive capacities characterize these areas. Vulnerability hotspots can easily be identified through these maps, which have value in planning initiative to reduce potential damages of floods to agricultural areas.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Amaranto ◽  
Dinis Juizo ◽  
Andrea Castelletti

Abstract. Water management in sub-Saharan African river basins is challenged by uncertain future climatic, social and economical patterns, potentially causing diverging water demands and availability, as well as by multi-stakeholder dynamics, resulting in evolving conflicts and tradeoffs. In such contexts, a better understanding of the sensitivity of water management to the different sources of uncertainty can support policy makers in identifying robust water supply policies balancing optimality and low vulnerability against likely adverse future conditions. This paper contributes an integrated decision-analytic framework combining optimization, robustness, sensitivity and uncertainty analysis to retrieve the main sources of vulnerability to optimal and robust reservoir operating policies across multi-dimensional objective spaces. We demonstrate our approach onto the lower Umbeluzi river basin, Mozambique, an archetypal example of sub-Saharan river basin, where surface water scarcity compounded by substantial climatic variability, uncontrolled urbanization rate, and agricultural expansion are hampering the Pequenos Lipompos dam ability of supplying the agricultural, energy and urban sectors. We adopt an Evolutionary Multi-Objective Direct Policy Search optimization approach for designing optimal operating policies, whose robustness against social, agricultural, infrastructural and climatic uncertainties is assessed via robustness analysis. We then implement the GLUE and PAWN uncertainty and sensitivity analysis methods for disentangling the main challenges to the sustainability of the operating policies and quantifying their impacts on the urban, agricultural and energy sectors. Numerical results highlight the importance of robustness analysis when dealing with uncertain scenarios, with optimal-non robust reservoir operating policies largely dominated by robust control strategies across all stakeholders. Furthermore, while robust policies are usually vulnerable only to hydrological perturbations and are able to sustain the majority of population growth and agricultural expansion scenarios, non-robust policies are sensitive also to social and agricultural changes, and require structural interventions to ensure stable supply.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-202
Author(s):  
NAVEEN P. SINGH ◽  
SURENDRA SINGH ◽  
BHAWNA ANAND ◽  
S. K. BAL

This paper assesses the district level climate vulnerability in the state of Rajasthan using largescale data on climate and socio-economic variables.More than thirty indicators segregated into four components of exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity and crop production loss were combined to develop a composite index of vulnerability and homogenous districts were clustered into three categories, viz.low, medium and high.Wide inter-district variations were observed across the calculated indices. The result reveals that highest production losses occurred in Ganganagar district followed by Hanumangarh and Bharatpur. Pali was least exposed to the climatic variability, whereas Bundi had the maximum exposure.Jaisalmer rated the maximum sensitivity level. Further, Pratapgarh followed by Jaisalmer and Banswara had the lowest degree of adaptive capacity. On the whole, districts like Hanumangarh, Jaisalmer, Ganganagar, Bundi, Bharatpur, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Chittorgarh, Alwar, Baran and Pratapgarh exhibit high level of vulnerability to climatic change. While on the other spectrum Sirohi district was least vulnerable due to lower exposure, sensitivity, crop production loss and high adaptive capacity. The analysis, suggests the need for prioritizing vulnerable areas to arrest regional imbalances by encouraging need/location based interventions for moderating the degree of vulnerability, whilst making agro-ecosystem in Rajasthan resilient to climatic aberrations. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1099 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nannan Wu ◽  
Yejun Xu ◽  
D. Kilgour

An incomplete fuzzy preference framework for the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution (GMCR) is proposed to handle both complete and incomplete fuzzy preference information. Usually, decision makers’ (DMs’) fuzzy preferences are assumed to be complete fuzzy preference relations (FPRs). However, in real-life situations, due to lack of information or limited expertise in the problem domain, any DM’s preference may be an incomplete fuzzy preference relation (IFPR). An inherent advantage of the proposed framework for GMCR is that it can complete the IFPRs based on additive consistency, which is a special form of transitivity, a common property of preferences. After introducing the concepts of FPR, IFPR, and transitivity, we propose an algorithm to supplement IFPR, that is, to find an FPR that is a good approximation. To illustrate the usefulness of the incomplete fuzzy preference framework for GMCR, we demonstrate it using to a real-world conflict over water allocation that took place in the Zhanghe River basin of China.


2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 61-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
V. I. Monchenko ◽  
L. P. Gaponova ◽  
V. R. Alekseev

Crossbreeding experiments were used to estimate cryptic species in water bodies of Ukraine and Russia because the most useful criterion in species independence is reproductive isolation. The problem of cryptic species in the genus Eucyclops was examined using interpopulation crosses of populations collected from Baltic Sea basin (pond of Strelka river basin) and Black Sea basin (water-reservoires of Dnieper, Dniester and Danube rivers basins). The results of reciprocal crosses in Eucyclops serrulatus-group are shown that E. serrulatus from different populations but from water bodies belonging to the same river basin crossed each others successfully. The interpopulation crosses of E. serrulatus populations collected from different river basins (Dnipro, Danube and Dniester river basins) were sterile. In this group of experiments we assigned evidence of sterility to four categories: 1) incomplete copulation or absence of copulation; 2) nonviable eggs; 3) absence of egg membranes or egg sacs 4) empty egg membranes. These crossbreeding studies suggest the presence of cryptic species in the E. serrulatus inhabiting ecologically different populations in many parts of its range. The same crossbreeding experiments were carries out between Eucyclops serrulatus and morphological similar species – Eucyclops macruroides from Baltic and Black Sea basins. The reciprocal crossings between these two species were sterile. Thus taxonomic heterogeneity among species of genus Eucyclops lower in E. macruroides than in E. serrulatus. The interpopulation crosses of E. macruroides populations collected from distant part of range were fertile. These crossbreeding studies suggest that E. macruroides species complex was evaluated as more stable than E. serrulatus species complex.


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