Compounding Impacts of Human-Induced Water Stress and Climate Change on Water Availability.

ABSTRACT: The terrestrial phase of the water cycle can be seriously impacted by water management and human water use behavior (e.g., reservoir operation, and irrigation withdrawals). Here we outline a method for assessing water availability in a changing climate, while explicitly considering anthropogenic water demand scenarios and water supply infrastructure designed to cope with climatic extremes. The framework brings a top-down and bottom-up approach to provide localized water assessment based on local water supply infrastructure and projected water demands. When our framework is applied to southeastern Australia we find that, for some combinations of climatic change and water demand, the region could experience water stress similar or worse than the epic Millennium Drought. We show considering o

SUBMITTER: Mehran A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5524826 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature