Sustainable Water: Uncertainty, Risk and Vulnerability in Europe

Workplan

The generic methodology used to reach the defined objectives has been developed and applied according to the following scheme agreed by the consortium of researchers and end-users:

• Organisation into four thematic Work Packages (WPs). The WPs are briefly:
  • WP1 Future scenario development incorporating uncertainty
  • WP2 Strategies for sustainable management and planning
  • WP3 Hazards, risk and vulnerability assessment
  • WP4 Socio-economic and ecological impact assessment
• Application to eight specialised Case Studies (CSs), chosen in collaboration with end-users in the water sector, related industries and regulatory authorities. (Some Case Studies have more than one aspect relevant to SWURVE and therefore appear in more than one WP). Briefly, the Case Studies are:
  • CS1 Surface Water Reservoir System in NW Europe
  • CS2 Combined Sewer Overflow in NW Europe
  • CS3 Lake regulation in the northern Alps
  • CS4 Alpine hydropower dam operation
  • CS5 Trans-boundary river basin in Iberia
  • CS6 Iberian municipal water supply
  • CS7 Discharges in the Rhine affecting flood risk and navigation
  • CS8 Ecological impacts of river regime on salmon fisheries
• Execution by well-integrated Research Teams, comprising a lead contractor, assisted by, and collaborating with, the end-users. Each team is focused on certain Case Studies only, according to their expertise and ongoing collaborations. Each team (except the co-ordinator, Team 1) leads a Work Package, according to their particular expertise and which Case Studies they are leading: so, WP1 is led by Team 4, WP2 by Team 5, WP 3 by Team 2 and WP4 by Team 3.

Because aspects of some Case Studies (CSs) appear in more than one WP, a full description of the CS will be given only in the WP for which it is a major component. See Table for the inter-relation between CSs and WPs:

Description of diagram

A generic methodology is followed for each Case Study. This allows inter-comparison of impacts, identification of important factors and differences between cases, and validation of the transferability of the methods to applications elsewhere in Europe. The overall methodology may be described as follows:

1. Develop and validate a deterministic simulation model of the resource system, river basin, eco-system etc. using observed data (in most of the proposed Case Studies, part or entire models already exist and are used in operational procedures).
2. Analyse the outputs in terms of system performance measures, i.e. resilience, reliability and vulnerability, which can be compared with other systems in a general, transferable and meaningful way.
3. Apply the simulation model with long series of inputs (e.g. 1000 years) to produce long series of outputs (a Monte Carlo simulation), for both a present day case (control) and a number of future (perturbed) cases. The future cases will be derived from representative GCM simulations.
4. Apply scaling methods to determine changes in regional climate variables for different greenhouse gas emission scenarios and global climate sensitivities and establish statistical relationships between regional climate variables and the local rainfall statistics. This then allows a large range of possible future scenarios to be sampled statistically, without the major computational and time expense of generating explicit time series as in (3).
5. Derive statistical descriptions of the hydrological or system model inputs (e.g. pdfs of rainfall amounts) and the outputs (e.g. flow duration curves or reliability of a system).
6. Perform uncertainty analysis using these relationships and those from (4), accounting for the full range of possible GCM emission scenarios, model versus real climate sensitivity and climate variability.
7. Estimate the vulnerability of various systems to the predicted future climate changes taking into account consequential economic and management impacts and produce plans for mitigating the predicted impacts.

• Work Package 1 Future scenario development incorporating uncertainty
• Work Package 2 Strategies for sustainable management and planning
• Work Package 3 Hazards, risk and vulnerability assessment
• Work Package 4 Socio-economic and ecological impact assessment