IRI's climate risk management work in Andean River Basins
Farmland in the Andes. Photo: H. Bhojwani
Andean societies rely heavily on glacial runoff for their drinking water, agriculture and hydropower production. The possible disappearance or shrinking of glaciers in coming decades because of global warming would have grave consequences for the region. Recognizing this, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society and its partners have just started on a two-year project to characterize how climate change will impact water resources and the people who rely on them in three major Andean river basins. The work, funded by the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI), centers on the Elqui watershed in Chile, the Mendoza basin in Argentina and the Huayna Potosi in Bolivia. "These basins are prime examples of areas considered vulnerable to climate change because of their geography and because they are dependent on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture," says Casey Brown, who is the principal IRI scientist on the project. A region's vulnerability to climate change certainly depends on environmental factors, such as changes in the frequency and severity of droughts or shifts in rainfall patterns, he says. But it also depends on social factors--how well do the communities understand the risks involved? Are governments and institutions well adapted to absorb, cope with, manage and recover from those risks? Brown and his IRI colleague, Paul Block, hope the study will shed light on these kinds of vulnerabilities. IRI is working with Canada's University of Regina, which is coordinating and administering the project. The first phase will involve sending out local teams in each basin to identify and collect sociological data on the major agronomic groups--groups such as herders, farmers and vintners--that rely on stable water supplies. The researchers will also canvas decision makers and policy makers in local government and nongovernmental organizations. "The goal is to try to characterize their current dependence on water resources," says Block, a postdoctoral research scientist who studies water-resource management. Brown and Block will combine the sociological data with historical data and 20-year projections of climate variability for the region to see how the vulnerabilities of these different identified groups change. The climate projections will come from a much larger IAI-funded study--in which the IRI isn't involved--that is attempting to characterize the hydrology of glacially-fed basins throughout the entire mountainous "backbone" of the Americas. "Combining the two different kinds of data allows us to determine which groups become more or less vulnerable, and how resilient each group is to different climate-change scenarios," says Block. Armed with this IRI-based analysis, the local teams of sociologists would then revisit the groups with new questions, such as, 'How would your current practices change, given a 5%, 10% or 15% decrease in water supply?' "The ultimate goal is enable the parties responsible for water-allocation, such as governments or private water groups, to design better policy and climate-adaptation strategies in the region," says Brown. Relevant Links About the IRI About the IRI
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