Performance of a Rain Barrel Sharing Network under Climate Change

Rain barrels can be technically shared through social practices or mutual agreement between individual households. This study proposes the evaluation system for a rain barrel sharing network (RBSN) considering three performance criteria of reliability, resiliency, and vulnerability, under plausible climate change scenarios. First, this study shows how the system can be improved in terms of the performance criteria using historical daily rainfall data based on the storage-reliability-yield relationship. This study then examined how the benefits from RBSN are affected by climate change after 100 years. Three climate change scenarios (A1B, A2 and B2) and three global circulation models were used for this purpose. The results showed that the reliability and vulnerability are improved due to sharing and their improvements become larger under climate change conditions. In contrast, the resiliency reduces slightly due to sharing and its reduction is attenuated under climate change conditions. In particular, vulnerability will be reduced significantly under climate change. These results suggest that the sharing of various water resources systems can be an effective climate change adaptation strategy that reduces vulnerability and increases the reliability of the system.