Back to Search
Start Over
Can integrative catchment management mitigate future water quality issues caused by climate change and socio-economic development?
- Source :
- Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Vol 21, Iss 3, Pp 1593-1609 (2017)
- Publication Year :
- 2016
- Publisher :
- Copernicus GmbH, 2016.
-
Abstract
- Catchments are complex systems where water quantity, quality and the provided ecological services are determined by interacting physical, chemical, biological, economic, and social factors. The awareness of these interactions led to the prevailing catchment management paradigm of Integrated Water Resources Management. The design and evaluation of solutions for integrated water resources management requires to predict changes of local or regional water quality, which requires integrated approach for modeling too. On one hand, integrated models have to be comprehensive enough to cover the aspects relevant for management decisions, allow for mapping of global change processes – as climate change, population growth, migration, and socio-economic development – to the regional and local contexts. On the other hand, models have to be sufficiently simple and fast enough to apply proper methods of uncertainty analysis, which can consider model structure deficits and propagate errors through the chain of submodels. Here, we present an integrated catchment model satisfying both objectives. The conceptual "iWaQa" model was developed to support the integrated management of small streams. It can predict both traditional water quality parameters like nutrients and a wide set of organic micropollutants originating from plant and material protection products. Due to the model's simplicity, it allows for a full, propagative analysis of predictive uncertainty, including certain structural and input errors. The usefulness of the model is demonstrated by predicting future water quality in a small catchment with mixed land use in the Swiss Plateau. The focus of our study is the change of water quality over the next decades driven by climate change, population growth or decline, socio-economic development and the implementation of management strategies for improving water quality. Our results indicate that input and model structure uncertainties are the most influential factors on certain water quality parameters and in these cases the uncertainty of modeling is already very high for the present conditions. Nevertheless, a proper quantification of today's uncertainty can make the management fairly robust for the foreseen range of possible evolution into the next decades. With a time-horizon of 2050, it seems that human land use and management decisions have a larger influence on water quality than climate change. However, the analysis of single climate model chains indicates that the importance of climate grows when a certain climate prediction is considered instead of the ensemble forecast.
- Subjects :
- 0208 environmental biotechnology
Climate change
Time horizon
02 engineering and technology
lcsh:Technology
lcsh:TD1-1066
lcsh:Environmental technology. Sanitary engineering
Integrated management
Uncertainty analysis
lcsh:Environmental sciences
lcsh:GE1-350
Propagation of uncertainty
Land use
business.industry
lcsh:T
Environmental resource management
lcsh:Geography. Anthropology. Recreation
15. Life on land
6. Clean water
020801 environmental engineering
lcsh:G
13. Climate action
Environmental science
Climate model
Water quality
business
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, Vol 21, Iss 3, Pp 1593-1609 (2017)
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....2bfd5deee6c653a7efcef4e4e06f1a8e
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2016-297