3rd Joint Call: REBECCA

The Background

Climate change and socio-economic growth are projected to severely challenge river basin development worldwide, calling for robust planning solutions with respect to such uncertain and evolving conditions. This is particularly relevant in monsoonal Southeast Asia, where large water storage systems play a key role for securing water, energy, and food to a rapidly growing and changing society. These systems require robust and adaptive operations capable of coping with high intra-annual and inter-annual hydroclimatic variability and to increasing frequency of extreme events. They also have to face multi-sector changing demands across multiple time scales, from daily operation to strategic river basin development.

The Project

The ambition of the project is to develop a decision analytic framework for supporting the robust, strategic planning of river basins in monsoonal areas with respect to future changes in water availability (climate change) and demands (socio-​economic and technological changes). The framework will integrate future climate scenarios, including a catalogue of extreme climate events, future water demand scenarios, and a high-​resolution infrastructure-​accounting hydrological model to build accurate projections of water availability that also include water management policies optimized by means of a strategic model, against which to assess sustainability and robustness of future river basin development plans. The focus will be on the Red River Basin, China-​Vietnam, a large transboundary river basin, where conflicts among different water uses, including hydropower production, flood control and water supply, and negative impacts on long-​term sustainability are expected to increase under the combined pressure of increasing water and energy demands, and climate change. Particularly, extreme weather events are expected to become more frequent and extreme.

The Science

REBECCA will advance the current state-of-the-art from different scientific disciplines and integrate it within a multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary framework to support the robust, strategic planning of water infrastructures in river basins that will be highly impacted by climate and socio-economic changes, with a focus on monsoonal areas. The project will bring the current state-of-the-art of integrated water resources management a step further by: (i) developing a decision analytic framework that explicitly integrates multiple models and their feedbacks, including a detailed characterization of the co-variance between future hydro-climatic and socio-economic changes; (ii) quantifying the impacts of future hydro-climatic and socio-economic scenarios on water resources, planned infrastructures and strategic development plans of decision makers; (iii) identifying robust planning options (e.g., multi-purpose water reservoirs) that are able to deal with a vast array of highly uncertain future changes and still perform satisfactorily with respect to economic, environmental and societal aspects in order to foster environmentally and economically sustainable growth.

The Team

Project coordinator: Prof. Dr. Paolo Burlando, Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Prof. Dr. Andrea Castelletti, Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Dr. Anna Costa, Institute of Environmental Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Prof. Dr. Andreas H. Fink, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Dr. Roderick van der Linden, Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany

Dr. Van Anh Truong, Meteorology and Hydrology Faculty, Hanoi University of Natural Resources and Environment, Vietnam

Contact: Prof. Dr. Paolo Burlando, Dr. Anna Costa