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"Global costs of climate change adaptation in the industrial and municipal water supply sector"
To date there has been little research on the costs of adaptation to
climate change in the water sector at the global scale, which hampers
planning and negotiations with regards to the financial resource
allocations necessary for effective adaptation. To address this lack of
research, we carried out a global study to estimate the costs of
climate change related adaptation in the industrial and municipal water
supply sector. In this study, we develop and apply a methodology that
combines information from models on climate, hydrology and economics to
estimate the cost of providing enough water to meet future industrial
and municipal water demand, based on demand projections until 2050 at
the country level. Increased water demand between present and the
future scenarios is assumed to be met primarily through reservoir yield
by increasing the capacity of surface reservoir storage. The additional
reservoir storage capacity required to meet future water demand is
calculated using storage-yield curves, which show the storage capacity
needed to provide a firm yield and reliability of water supply over the
course of a year. For developed countries we estimated the net annual
cost of climate change related adaptation in water supply to be $1-2
billion p.a. The costs for developing countries are higher at around
$10 billion p.a.
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Luke Brander:
Researcher of the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands).
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