Climate change uncertainty in environmental flows for the Mekong River

Abstract

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GCM-related uncertainty for river flows and inundation under climate change: the Inner Niger Delta

“…Environmental flow methodologies, such as the widely used Range of Variability Approach that employs Indicators of Hydrological Alteration (IHA), provide statistical techniques for comparing natural and altered flow regimes (Richter et al 1996(Richter et al , 1997. Thompson et al (2014b), for example, employed a modified IHA approach (Laizé et al 2014) to investigate changes in environmental flows throughout the Mekong. This included the development of a risk-based assessment of the magnitude of change.…”

“…Hydrological changes can then be used to infer impacts on, for example, ecological conditions or ecosystem service provision (e.g. Thompson et al 2009, 2014b, Singh et al 2010, 2011. Each stage of climate change impact assessments introduces uncertainty .…”

Dams on Mekong tributaries as significant contributors of hydrological alterations to the Tonle Sap Floodplain in Cambodia

“…Although this tool has been previously used for simulated scenarios by Gao et al (2009), their scenarios represented hypothetical reservoirs and dam operations, whereas our study represented existing and proposed projects based on actual design characteristics. IHA tools have been used in the Mekong by Ty et al (2011) and Thompson et al (2013), but their applications focused on climate change and excluded the Tonle Sap flooding characteristics. Our study has made a first attempt at quantifying environmental flows for the Tonle Sap using the simulations of baseline conditions, and our estimates could help guide environmental flow criteria based on the specific biological needs of this system.…”

Impacts of Climate Change on Riverine Ecosystems: Alterations of Ecologically Relevant Flow Dynamics in the Danube River and Its Major Tributaries

“…When simulating future river flows, the driving GCM forcing was found to have the largest contribution to the overall modeling uncertainty [55,56]. Thompson et al [27] reported considerable inter-GCM differences in the risk of ecological impact in their climate change impact assessment on environmental flows in the Mekong River basin. In this study, bias correction adds an additional factor of uncertainty, while giving a better representation of the recent climatic conditions.…”