En el marco de 3POLE4FOOD, FutureWater contribuye a la evaluación de los efectos a largo plazo del cambio climático sobre la disponibilidad de agua y la producción agrícola en las principales cuencas fluviales asiáticas. El proyecto combina la modelización de la hidrología de montaña con la hidrología aguas abajo y la modelización de la producción agrícola para comprender mejor cómo los cambios en la nieve, el deshielo de los glaciares, las precipitaciones y la temperatura afectan al suministro de agua de riego y a la producción agrícola.

FutureWater lidera actividades técnicas clave relacionadas con los forzamientos climáticos, la corrección de sesgos en los conjuntos de datos meteorológicos y la generación de escenarios de cambio climático. Junto con Hydrominds y la Universidad de Wageningen, llevamos a cabo la modelización glaciohidrológica y el análisis de las interrelaciones hídricas entre las zonas aguas arriba y aguas abajo. Mediante el modelo SPHY, se simulan los caudales históricos y futuros de las cuencas de montaña, incluyendo las aportaciones de las precipitaciones, el deshielo de la nieve y el deshielo de los glaciares. Estos resultados se combinan con el modelo LPJmL para evaluar la disponibilidad de agua aguas abajo, la demanda de riego, el rendimiento de los cultivos y la productividad hídrica de los cultivos en futuros escenarios climáticos y socioeconómicos.

El proyecto proporciona una base científica para identificar las zonas en riesgo y comprender dónde los sistemas agrícolas pueden volverse más vulnerables a los cambios en el suministro de agua de las zonas montañosas. Al vincular el clima, la hidrología y la producción alimentaria, 3POLE4FOOD apoya una planificación basada en datos empíricos para lograr cuencas fluviales resilientes y sistemas alimentarios sostenibles en Asia.

Cuencas fluviales con origen en las altas montañas de Asia incluidas en el proyecto 3POLE4FOOD. El polígono blanco indica las zonas de alta montaña.

Countries in Asia and the Pacific region are significantly exposed to disaster risks from various hazards and are on the frontline of a climate emergency. Studies suggest that 80% of the globally affected people belong to the Asia-Pacific region, thus emphasizing the critical need for an effective multi-hazard EWS.

EWS, a cost-effective tool for saving lives and reducing economic losses, is particularly crucial for frequent and hazardous weather, water, and climate events. However, despite advancements in the four EWS components, major gaps persist, with implementation lagging and limited coverage in frontline countries, including least developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDS). As of 2021, only 50% of countries in Asia and the Pacific reported having multi-hazard early warning systems (MHEWS), emphasizing the need for support.

The culmination of these efforts will be encapsulated in a scoping report, documenting the results of the project, including consultations with key partners and stakeholders during the Regional Workshop on Increasing Investments in Early Warning Systems, to be held in February 2024 in Bangkok, Thailand. The study will offer a comprehensive summary of the EWS scoping, encompassing the policy and institutional landscape, status, initiatives, and investments, as well as residual gaps for regional and national EWS programming in selected DMCs. Additionally, this study will provide guidelines for the implementation and operationalization of the proposed EWS facility, along with initial investment concept notes based on EWS priorities at regional and/or national levels. This holistic approach aims to contribute substantively to the strengthening of EWS capacities, fostering resilience in the face of increasing disaster risks across the region.

Nepal ofrece un terreno de pruebas ideal debido al fuerte apoyo gubernamental a la agricultura climáticamente inteligente, una gran población de pequeños agricultores vulnerables y la participación activa de organizaciones como el Centro de Investigación sobre la Resiliencia Climática (CRRC) y el Centro Internacional para el Desarrollo Integrado de las Montañas (ICIMOD). Los resultados de esta viabilidad respaldarán los objetivos de las políticas nacionales y podrán extenderse a regiones montañosas similares del sur de Asia.

Este proyecto se centra en el distrito de Syangja, en la provincia de Gandaki, que se enfrenta a una creciente escasez de agua y a precipitaciones impredecibles, especialmente en las explotaciones agrícolas de ladera que dependen del riego por manantial y de la agricultura de secano. Estas condiciones hacen inviable el riego tradicional y crean la necesidad de soluciones de baja presión, asequibles y adaptables localmente. El pulverizador inteligente combina un hardware práctico con una herramienta digital de asesoramiento para optimizar el uso limitado del agua: una innovación frugal adaptada a las necesidades de los pequeños agricultores.

Croptimal combina características del cultivo, del campo y del riego con datos de estaciones meteorológicas y satelitales para proporcionar asesoramiento de riego.

El proyecto implica la viabilidad de un sistema de riego integrado y de bajo coste «Smart Sprayer» basado en Croptimal pero adaptado a la agricultura de ladera que ofrece consejos prácticos de riego por WhatsApp/SMS. La principal innovación es el pulverizador inteligente, un dispositivo de riego de micropivote de baja presión alimentado por gravedad que se combina con una herramienta de riego inteligente adaptada. La plataforma digital ofrece asesoramiento diario sobre riego basado en datos a los teléfonos de los agricultores. Juntos, ofrecen un paquete escalable y rentable para un uso preciso y eficiente del agua en explotaciones situadas en laderas remotas.

El objetivo principal es mejorar la seguridad hídrica y la productividad agrícola de los pequeños agricultores de media montaña durante la estación seca en Nepal. Más concretamente, demostrar la viabilidad técnica, económica y social de una solución de riego de baja presión en combinación con el asesoramiento sobre riego basado en datos de teledetección y previsiones meteorológicas. Esto incluye la investigación de mercado y el desarrollo de casos de negocio tanto para los agricultores como para los proveedores locales.

La aplicación Croptimal está disponible en Croptimal.app. Póngase en contacto con nosotros si desea más información o solicitar su propia cuenta.

Vídeo: Croptimal – Asesoramiento inteligente de riego impulsado por datos

Video: Croptimal en Nepal

Vídeo: Resultados del estudio de viabilidad

 

La alarmante disminución de los manantiales se ha atribuido a la rápida expansión de las redes viales, junto con los cambios en la cobertura del suelo y el clima. El desarrollo de carreteras en estas áreas expone los manantiales a alteraciones o modifica su flujo natural, mientras que el corte de rocas interrumpe la ubicación de los orificios de los manantiales. Este problema ha pasado en gran medida desapercibido, lo que supone una amenaza significativa para las comunidades locales y sus recursos hídricos.

El objetivo principal del proyecto es reinventar las carreteras como instrumentos para la mejora del paisaje en lugar de adversarios, aprovechando el desarrollo vial para contribuir positivamente a los recursos hídricos locales. Al integrar técnicas y herramientas (gemelos digitales y un conjunto de herramientas de apoyo a la toma de decisiones), el proyecto pretende garantizar un suministro de agua seguro y fiable para las personas en zonas montañosas, al tiempo que se protege la calidad de la infraestructura vial y se mantiene la conectividad. El municipio de Dhankuta y el Departamento de Infraestructura Local (DoLI), que regula las actividades de desarrollo de infraestructuras en Nepal, serán los principales beneficiarios de este proyecto.

Los resultados esperados del proyecto RoSPro incluyen:

  1. Implementación exitosa de la protección de manantiales junto a carreteras a través de intervenciones piloto en el municipio de Dhankuta y promoción de enfoques basados en “soluciones basadas en la naturaleza” y “Carreteras Verdes para el Agua (GR4W)”.
  2. Generación de evidencia sobre el impacto de la intervención piloto a través de un análisis de costo-beneficio.
  3. Evaluación del impacto potencial de la ampliación de la protección de manantiales junto a carreteras mediante el desarrollo de un gemelo digital y un conjunto de herramientas de apoyo a la toma de decisiones.
  4. Desarrollo de capacidades para el municipio de Dhankuta y DoLI en lo que respecta a enfoques, tecnologías, impacto y ampliación de la protección de manantiales junto a carreteras.

RoSPro conducirá a una mayor seguridad hídrica para usos de consumo y productivos, beneficiando directamente a hasta 500 hogares en la región. Tras la fase piloto, el proyecto pretende ampliar sus servicios a clientes establecidos y redes de socios en Asia y África. La demanda de servicios similares es alta en muchos países de alta montaña, y RoSPro tiene como objetivo generar un marco para escalar este modelo a niveles nacionales y regionales.

Así, RoSPro es una iniciativa vital que busca abordar el problema crítico de la disminución de manantiales en el Himalaya. Al transformar el desarrollo vial en un contribuyente a los recursos hídricos locales, RoSPro mejorará la seguridad y calidad del agua, beneficiando tanto a las comunidades como al medio ambiente en estas desafiantes regiones montañosas.

The inital Climate Risk Assessment (CRA) by FutureWater in 2021 for the Asian Development Bank (ADB) identified the need for a detailed CRA for the DKSHEP to understand the risk posed by the changing climate on hydropower and the environment. Therefore, the objective of this Climate Risk and Adaptation Assessment (CRA) is to assess the vulnerability of the project components to future climate change and recommend adaptation options for climate-proofing the design. This CRA covers both type 2 adaptation, related to system change and resilience building, as well as type 1 adaptation related to climate-proofing. FutureWater will support ADB to ensure that the project will adequately address climate change mitigation and adaptation in accordance with ADB’s requirements.

FutureWater will make use of state-of-the-art downscaled Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) ensembles, and other relevant hazards and local information to develop this CRA. Insights from the CRA will be used to devise adaptation strategies. FutureWater will also ensure climate resilience measures are incorporated into the detailed design and environmental management planning before finalizing the climate change risk assessment. Together with the client’s engineering and safeguards team (Nepal Electricity Authority), FutureWater will ensure that the detailed design and environmental management plans incorporate all other recommended climate resilience measures and that their implementation is sufficiently detailed including bioengineering techniques, nature-based solutions, and an early warning system. FutureWater will collate the information and work closely with the national geological and GLOF consultants to review all available options for (i) sediment management plan, (ii) upstream catchment management plan, and (iii) emergency preparedness and response plan. FutureWater will provide several capacity-building sessions to the project team on the findings of the initial CRA, and the potential options for climate resilience measures to incorporate in the project design and operation to address the risks identified. Moreover, this project will develop a GHG account and prepare SARD climate change screening and Paris Agreement alignment assessment.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) identified the need for a detailed Climate Risk and Adaptation (CRA) assessment for the DKSHEP to understand the risk posed by the changing climate on hydropower and the environment. Therefore, the objective of this Climate Risk and Adaptation Assessment (CRA) is to assess the vulnerability of the project components to future climate change and recommend adaptation options for climate-proofing of the design. Therefore, this CRA covers both type 2 adaptation, related to system change and resilience building, as well as type 1 adaptation related to climate-proofing This CRA assesses historic trends in relevant climate-related variables and analyses climate projections for the DKSHEP. Based on these projections, an assessment of the current and future climate risks and vulnerabilities relating to the proposed project activities will be outlined. Finally, recommendations will be presented for climate adaptation measures.

Nepal’s freshwater availability and timing are under thread by extreme temperature and precipitation variations, changing monsoon patterns, melting of ice caps and glaciers, and reduced snow cover. Some initial estimated economic cost of climate change in agriculture, hydropower and water induced disasters show a number of up to 2-3% of GDP per year by 2050.

The proposed project aims to improve landscape-scale adaptation and disaster risk management through a set of outputs:

  1. Climate-smart landscape management practices adopted and enhanced
  2. Climate-resilient rural livelihoods developed
  3. Integrated disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation approaches
  4. Capacities of local communities, regional and national decision-makers, and institutions on climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction strengthened

FutureWater developed a so-called “Problem Tree” analysis for the proposed project. A Problem Tree is a helpful tool to understand the relationships between a problem, its causes, and its effects. The trunk of the tree represents the main problem, the roots the causes of the problem, and the branches the direct and indirect effects of the problem.

The project will be further developed as a so-called Climate Change Adaptation Project. More traditional development projects include also climate proofing, but focus is on development investments and adaptation is a secondary objective. Although those development projects contribute to adaptation (by helping the proposed asset or activity being financed to adapt to identified physical climate risks to the asset/activity), the primary objective of such a project is not adaptation. Climate Change Adaptation Projects are intentionally designed to enable climate adaptation of a high-risk topics. This is achieved by supporting outputs and activities that reduce the impacts of current and future expected climate risks and/or address barriers to adaptation, thereby advancing resilience. So this Climate Change Adaptation Project is meant to advance Nepal’s goal on adaptation.

Flooding has always been a major cause of natural disasters in a mountainous country like Nepal. Among the many natural disasters that affect Nepal, the recurring floods during the monsoon season have catastrophic consequences every year. Nepal’s fragile geological conditions and complex topography combined with frequently occurring extreme rainfall during the monsoon poses risks to communities living along the flood plains. In order to ensure good flood management practices and the development of long-term water management strategies a good understanding of key hydrological processes and the ability to simulate future changes in streamflow is a prerequisite.

During recent years, FutureWater has done many projects in collaboration with NGO’s, INGO’s and academic institutions in Nepal. This is the first time FutureWater collaborated with the Institute of Forestry (IOF), Nepal to provide their teaching faculty and researchers a training on “Use of open source platform for hydrological modelling of data sparse regions in Nepal”. The Tailor Made Training (TMT) was fully funded by NUFFIC’s Orange Knowledge Programme (OKP) and took place from 8 April to 24 April 2019 in Pokhara, Nepal.

Essential skills, in particular modelling of hydrological processes are currently lacking at IOF, hampering the capacity to gain deep understanding of the present and future flood management situation in the region. Therewith IOF faces difficulties in developing long-term strategies to deal with climate change impacts for Nepal’s water resources. Further, the lack of ground-based measurements in the Himalayan region imposes an additional level of complexity while modelling the hydrological characteristics of this region. The use of readily available open source satellite-based data can augment the limited ground-based observation in the region.

Overall, the training fulfilled all the needs of the IOF, and was positively evaluated by the participants. This training program has encouraged the faculty members from IOF to use open source data and platforms in their future research and teaching.

The SREB is part of the Belt and Road Initiative, being a development strategy that focuses on connectivity and cooperation between Eurasian countries. Essentially, the SREB includes countries situated on the original Silk Road through Central Asia, West Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The initiative calls for the integration of the region into a cohesive economic area through building infrastructure, increasing cultural exchanges, and broadening trade. A major part of the SREB traverses Asia’s high-altitude areas, also referred to as the Third Pole or the Asian Water Tower. In the light of the planned development for the SREB traversing the Third Pole and its immediate surroundings, the “Pan-Third Pole Environment study for a Green Silk Road (Pan-TPE)” program will be implemented.

The project will assess the state and fate of water resources in the region under following research themes:

1. Observed and projected Pan-TPE climate change
2. Impacts on the present and future Water Tower of Asia
3. The Green Silk Road and changes in water demand
4. Adaptation for green development

In irrigated agriculture options to save water tend to focus on improved irrigation techniques such as drip and sprinkler irrigation. These irrigation techniques are promoted as legitimate means of increasing water efficiency and “saving water” for other uses (such as domestic use and the environment). However, a growing body of evidence, including a key report by FAO (Perry and Steduto, 2017) shows that in most cases, water “savings” at field scale translate into an increase in water consumption at system and basin scale. Yet despite the growing and irrefutable body of evidence, false “water savings” technologies continue to be promoted, subsidized and implemented as a solution to water scarcity in agriculture.

The goal is to stop false “water savings” technologies to be promoted, subsidized and implemented. To achieve this, it is important to quantify the hydrologic impacts of any new investment or policy in the water sector. Normally, irrigation engineers and planners are trained to look at field scale efficiencies or irrigation system efficiencies at the most. Also, many of the tools used by irrigation engineers are field scale oriented (e.g. FAO AquaCrop model). The serious consequences of these actions are to worsen water scarcity, increase vulnerability to drought, and threaten food security.

There is an urgent need to develop simple and pragmatic tools that can evaluate the impact of field scale crop-water interventions at larger scales (e.g. irrigation systems and basins). Although basin scale hydrological models exist, many of these are either overly complex and unable to be used by practitioners, or not specifically designed for the upscaling from field interventions to basin scale impacts. Moreover, achieving results from the widely-used FAO models such as AquaCrop into a basin-wide impact model is time-consuming, complex and expensive. Therefore, FutureWater is developing a simple but robust tool to enhance usability and reach, transparency, transferability in data input and output. The tool is based on proven concepts of water productivity, water accounting and the appropriate water terminology, as promoted by FAO globally (FAO, 2013). Hence, the water use is separated in consumptive use, non-consumptive use, and change in storage (Figure 1).

Separation of water use according to the FAO terminology.

A complete training package is developed which includes a training manual and an inventory of possible field level interventions. The training manual includes the following aspects: 1) introduce and present the real water savings tool, 2) Describe the theory underlying the tool and demonstrating some typical applications, 3) Learn how-to prepare the data required for the tool for your own area of interest, 4) Learn when real water savings occur at system and basin scale with field interventions.

The REWAS tool can be downloaded here.