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Climate Change, Mountain Hydrology and Institutional Constraints: International and Local Dimensions

Annual Call for Projects 2003

Summary

A crucial vulnerability faced by the international community in the near future will be access to fresh water in sufficient quantity and of adequate quality to meet increasing and more diverse needs of a growing world population. Mountains have always held a privileged relationship with water as the sources of the world's greatest rivers and as the home of the great reserves of water held in glaciers. Major global forces nevertheless threaten these mountain reservoirs. Climate change is predicted to modify quantities of water available as well as to shift its seasonality. Perhaps even greater challenges will come from the dynamics of human behaviour. Population growth, changing norms and evolving activities are all predicted to increase competition for use of water among agriculture, industry, leisure and domestic activities. Societal rules and norms such as pricing schemes, regulations and property rights determine who gets how much water and when. Their effective design will contribute to efficient and equitable distribution, while poor management can aggravate shortages, lead to more natural disasters, increase social and economic disparities, and also acts as a potential source of deadly international conflict.

Switzerland is in a privileged position to take a lead in investigating such critical issues. The Alps are among the great "water towers of the world." The country's academic institutions have a long tradition of excellence in the sciences of water, snow and ice. Political will is also strong, as shown by the call for an "International Partnership for Sustainable Development in Mountain Regions," launched at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002. International organisations, many of which are located in Geneva, address both mountain and water issues. This project will take full advantage of these synergies to examine the interaction between natural and social processes governing water use. It proposes to combine advanced hydrological methods and socio-economic analysis to anticipate future climate developments and especially their consequences for societies. The research team intends to test the combination of these new methodologies for various mountain regions of the world, as well as for some significant downstream areas.

At the end of the project we expect to obtain:

• Data bases for specific regions under consideration: Himalayas (Nepal and India), Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan and neighbouring countries), the Andes, Alpine regions;

• Model validation runs;

• Evaluation of local situations resulting from changing hydrological and climatic conditions and analysis of possible adaptive responses;

• Elaboration of various policy scenarios in response to changing conditions in the local hydrological cycle due to climate change;

• Analyses of the impacts of increased erosion due to increased glacial runoff on agricultural and hydroelectric production;

• Analyses of the potential impacts of an increase in extreme events on both agricultural production systems and hydroelectric production and dam use.

The focus of the project is thus interdisciplinary and also clearly international and interregional. It will make use of these advanced methodologies to analyse significant international and interregional repercussions of changes in mountain hydrology. While its approach is global, its conclusions will emphasize local variabilities not only in hydrological processes but also in culture and populations' needs and wants. In this way, the project will contribute to the design of flexible tools to predict crucial vulnerabilities and allow for the design of potential mitigating strategies.

The grant provided by the GIAN for this project totals SFr 423,000

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Project Team

Dr. Wolfgang Grabs , Principal Member, World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) .

Dr. John Harding , Principal Member, International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (IDNDR), International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) .

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