Rethinking water resources management in a context of environmental change

环境变化背景下重新思考水资源管理

• 批准号: RGPIN-2016-05094
• 负责人: Seidou, Ousmane
• 金额: $ 1.75万
• 依托单位: University of Ottawa
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2020-01-01 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=709587
• 关键词: Rethinking; water; resources; management; context

Healthy water resources are key to the wealth and well-being of Canadians. Benefits to society, industry, and ecosystems are dependent on our ability to maintain water quality at acceptable levels as well as maintain an adequate temporal distribution of water quantity. A major challenge arises because both water quantity and quality are threatened by stressors including intensive agriculture, increased water demand, land use shifts, and climate change. And, the trend is expected to continue. The applicant has been working on the projection of the main stressors to water quality and quantity (climate change and land use), on the improvement of downscaling techniques, and the development of improved water management routines in hydro-ecological models. In the proposed research program, he aims to build on his previous work by developing methodologies and tools that can streamline projected changes into adaptation decisions. The problem is not new, and several researchers (including the applicant) have already tried to tackle the problem using a top-down approach, which essentially consists of using of a limited set of climate change scenarios to discover future risks. However, recent research has identified critical limitations in that approach. For instance, it has emerged that even when multi-model, multi-scenario projections are used, not all possible conditions are covered and, therefore, plausible risks may be overlooked. There is also no established way to evaluate the credibility of given projection scenarios, making it a challenge to include them in a decision or design framework. The bottom-up approach, which consists of identifying risky situations using stochastically generated climate states and then using projections to evaluate their likelihood in the future, was recently proposed to address the limitations of the top-down approach (Brown et al. 2011; Brown and Wilby 2012; Prudhomme et al. 2010), but several issues remain unaddressed. The objective of this five-year research program is to contribute toward issues that are yet to be adequately addressed in the bottom-up approach. Projected activities include the development and testing of a novel stochastic method that would clone and perturb an initial set of climate change scenarios derived from climate models and generate new ones that would cover the range of variability observed on the historical period; the exploration of new ways of evaluating the adequacy of a given weather generator for risk discovery in the bottom-up framework; the development of criteria to assess the value of a combination of climate models and downscaling technique in the bottom-up framework; and a case study to showcase the improvements in the South Nation watershed. Although the application will be centered in one pilot watershed, the methodology will be of interest for Canada and beyond.

健康的水资源是加拿大人财富和福祉的关键。对社会、工业和生态系统的好处取决于我们将水质维持在可接受的水平以及维持水量适当的时间分布的能力。由于水量和水质均受到集约农业、需水量增加、土地利用转变和气候变化等压力因素的威胁，因此出现了重大挑战。而且，预计这一趋势将持续下去。申请人一直致力于预测水质和水量的主要压力源（气候变化和土地利用）、改进降尺度技术以及开发水文生态模型中改进的水管理程序。在拟议的研究计划中，他的目标是在之前的工作基础上开发方法和工具，将预计的变化简化为适应决策。这个问题并不新鲜，一些研究人员（包括申请人）已经尝试使用自上而下的方法来解决该问题，该方法本质上包括使用一组有限的气候变化情景来发现未来的风险。然而，最近的研究发现了这种方法的严重局限性。例如，事实表明，即使使用多模型、多场景预测，也无法涵盖所有​​可能的情况，因此，可能会忽略合理的风险。也没有既定的方法来评估给定投影场景的可信度，这使得将它们纳入决策或设计框架成为一项挑战。自下而上的方法，包括使用随机生成的气候状态来识别风险情况，然后使用预测来评估其未来的可能性，最近被提出来解决自上而下方法的局限性（Brown等人，2011年；Brown和Wilby，2012年；Prudhomme等人，2010年），但有几个问题仍未解决。这个为期五年的研究计划的目标是为自下而上的方法中尚未充分解决的问题做出贡献。预计的活动包括开发和测试一种新的随机方法，该方法将克隆和扰乱从气候模型中得出的一组初始气候变化情景，并生成涵盖历史时期观察到的变化范围的新情景；探索在自下而上的框架中评估特定天气生成器是否足以发现风险的新方法；制定标准以评估自下而上框架中气候模型和降尺度技术组合的价值；以及展示南方国家流域改善情况的案例研究。尽管该应用程序将集中在一个试点流域，但该方法将引起加拿大及其他地区的兴趣。