This paper describes the development and first results of the "Community Integrated Assessment System" (CIAS), a unique multi-institutional modular and flexible integrated assessment system for modelling climate change. Key to this development is the supporting software infrastructure, SoftIAM. Through it, CIAS is distributed between the communities of institutions which has each contributed modules to the CIAS system. At the heart of SoftIAM is the Bespoke Framework Generator (BFG) which enables flexibility in the assembly and composition of individual modules from a pool to form coupled models within CIAS, and flexibility in their deployment onto the available software and hardware resources. Such flexibility greatly enhances modellers' ability to re-configure the CIAS coupled models to answer different questions, thus tracking evolving policy needs. It also allows rigorous testing of the robustness of IA modelling results to the use of different component modules representing the same processes (for example, the economy). Such processes are often modelled in very different ways, using different paradigms, at the participating institutions. An illustrative application to the study of the relationship between the economy and the earth's climate system is provided
Increasing irrigation efficiency is often assumed to be a means of saving water and a route to increasing irrigated agricultural production or making water available for other purposes, such as communities, industry or ecosystems. There is a growing body of literature arguing that increasing irrigation efficiency does not reduce consumptive water use in agriculture, implying that no additional water is made available for supporting environmental flows. However, understanding the implications of changes in irrigation efficiency for environmental flows requires assessment at temporal and spatial scales between the daily to seasonal field level analysis of advocates for increasing irrigation efficiency to save water, and the annual basin scale view of some of its critics. When investigated at these intermediate temporal and spatial scales, there may be potential for improvements in irrigation efficiency to mitigate the effects of irrigation on flow timings to an ecologically meaningful extent. In situations where this is possible, in advance of implementing irrigation efficiency programmes, overall water consumption must be limited by an effective water allocation regime that explicitly recognises environmental flow needs in order to prevent expansion or intensification of irrigated agriculture. This paper sets out some of the key issues that practitioners working on environmental flows should consider in order to assess whether or not interventions to increase irrigation efficiency can support environmental flow objectives.
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