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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 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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