Development of a Global Integrated Water Resources Model for Water Resources Assessments Under Climate Change

Abstract

A global water resources model was developed to assess the impact of climate change on water resources. The model consists of six modules, namely, land surface, river, agriculture, reservoir operation, environmental flow, and irrigation.One of the primary purposes of this model is to analyze availability of water resources at daily temporal resolution. We estimated the global distribution of water stressed area due to not only the limitation of annual total water resources but also the strong seasonality of them. The results show that the number of population living under water stressed condition reaches its peak around 2050 and remains high until the end of 21 st century under SRES A1B scenario.

Projection of future world water resources under SRES scenarios: water withdrawal / Projection des ressources en eau mondiales futures selon les scénarios du RSSE: prélèvement d'eau

“…Therefore, additional research is urgently needed to investigate agricultural water use in detail using integrated models with river routine schemes, reservoir operations (Hanasaki et al, 2006), interactive climateagricultural processes, and reasonable land-use forecasts. Our new generation model is expected to contribute to more reliable studies on this issue (Hanasaki et al, 2007).…”