Identifying and Addressing Infrastructure Vulnerabilities Under Climate Change in Data-Scarce Regions: the Role of Conservation

Abstract:

Climate change is expected to have dramatic impacts on built infrastructure, particularly in the water resources sector where infrastructure tends to have long lifespans and performance is highly sensitive to climate conditions. However, adapting to water resources infrastructure to climate change is challenging due to the considerable uncertainty surrounding projections of future hydrologic conditions. This has prompted the development of a number of approaches aimed at supporting planning under “deep-uncertainty” which cannot be represented probabilistically. One such method is robust decision making (RDM), which uses simulation models to assess how systems perform over a wide range of future scenarios and identify vulnerable scenarios where system performance is unacceptable. With the Lake Tana basin in Ethiopia as a case study, we use an RDM analysis to assess the vulnerability of planned irrigation infrastructure to climate change and environmental uncertainties related to data limitations. We find that planned infrastructure is vulnerable not only to climate change, but also to poorly characterized environmental conditions today. This suggests areas for research that could provide important insights into the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of the planned projects. Additionally, we evaluate the degree to which methods such as irrigation efficiency and upstream land conservation can improve the long-term performance of the proposed infrastructure. In doing so, we demonstrate how robust decision frameworks can provide decision support in data-scarce regions where more complex modeling and analysis may be impractical.