Climate change and water planning: is a single reduction coefficient appropriate for the whole river basin district?

Abstract

The inclusion of climate change in water planning is not an easy task, due to its high uncertainty. In Spain, climate change effect on water resources is quantified through the application of an only reduction coefficient to the historical time series of inflows in every river basin district. This paper is intended to provide further insight into this topic, using the new climate change scenarios and three conceptual rainfall-runoff models to simulate future inflows for the Jucar river basin. Our results suggest that the headwaters basins are prone to suffer higher rainfall reductions and temperature increases than the Mediterranean basins. Moreover, great uncertainty about resources’ reduction exists, which could be significantly greater than current water plan projections. In our opinion, system’s resilience should be confronted with a plausible rank of climatic stress conditions, to identify vulnerabilities and propose adaptation measures.

Keywords

• planificación hidrológica
• cambio climático
• incertidumbre
• análisis de tendencias.