High Mountain Asia hydropower systems threatened by climate-driven landscape instability

Abstract

Global warming-induced melting and thawing of the cryosphere are severely altering the volume and timing of water supplied from High Mountain Asia (HMA), adversely affecting downstream food and energy systems relied upon by billions of people. The construction of more reservoirs designed to regulate streamflow and produce hydropower is a critical part of strategies for adapting to these changes. However, these projects are vulnerable to a complex set of interacting processes that are destabilizing landscapes throughout the region. Ranging in severity and the pace of change, these processes include glacial retreat and detachments, permafrost thaw and associated landslides, rock-ice avalanches, debris flows, and outburst floods from glacial lakes and landslide-dammed lakes.The end result is large amounts of sediment being mobilized that can fill up reservoirs, cause dam failure, and degrade power turbines. Here, we recommend forward-looking design and maintenance measures and sustainable sediment management solutions that can help transition towards climate change-resilient dams and reservoirs in HMA, in large part based on improved monitoring and prediction of compound and cascading hazards.

Progress and challenges in glacial lake outburst flood research (2017–2021): a research community perspective

“…Iceland and Peru; Matti et al, 2022a) as well as rapid and often unregulated development in GLOF-prone areas (e.g. in India, Nepal and Peru; Schwanghart et al, 2016;Huggel et al, 2020a;Carey et al, 2021;Li et al, 2022) Identified challenges -Identification of overlooked or underestimated GLOF risk drivers and their consideration in GLOF risk management -Research often does not lead to tangible actions, partly because research projects often bypass decision-making stakeholders; scientific studies are often not well-connected to the applied works of practitioners -Ever-growing number of lake hazard/risk assessment schemes, with different scopes (susceptibility, hazard, risk assessment) and approaches; for decision-makers, differing results and contradicting information on "potentially dangerous lakes" are difficult to interpret -Design and implementation of GLOF risk reduction measures and their acceptance by hazard exposed communities (see also Sect. 4.5)…”

“…At the same time increasing urbanization, land and water demand, migration, mountain tourism, and other socioeconomic and human-related forces exacerbate human exposure and raise vulnerabilities to GLOFs, especially in low-income countries such as Peru or Nepal (Carey, 2010;Sherry et al, 2018;Motschmann et al, 2020a;Sherpa et al, 2020;Carey et al, 2021). However, possible synergies and trade-offs between climate change adaptation (Moulton et al, 2021;Aggarwal et al, 2021), sustainable water use and management (Drenkhan et al, 2019;Haeberli and Drenkhan, 2022), hydropower generation (Schwanghart et al, 2016;Li et al, 2022), glacier protection (Anacona et al, 2018), and GLOF hazard mitigation are still under discussion.…”

Measuring and Attributing Sedimentary and Geomorphic Responses to Modern Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities

“…Dryland warming, wildfires, lower water tables, and a decrease in already sparse plant cover together result in more airborne dust and actively migrating sand dunes in some arid and semi‐arid regions (Huang et al., 2016; Lancaster, 1997). These hydrologic and landscape impacts will affect ecosystems, often adversely, as well as human life, health, property, and infrastructure (Figure 2; e.g., Achakulwisut et al., 2019; CNN, 2022; East & Sankey, 2020; Hamlington et al., 2020; Irrgang et al., 2022; Jong‐Levinger et al., 2022; Lentz et al., 2016; Li et al., 2022; Mathieson et al., 2020).…”

Mechanisms Controlling Water‐Level Variations in the Middle Yangtze River Following the Operation of the Three Gorges Dam

“…His prediction is becoming true for river systems worldwide, with 𝐴𝐴 𝐴 45,000 large dams (height 𝐴𝐴 𝐴 15 m) distributed over 140 countries (Ma et al, 2022;Syvitski et al, 2022). Dams are often designed to generate hydropower and mitigate floods (Li et al, 2022;Ma et al, 2022), but they also disrupt river continuity and induce drastic temporal and spatial alterations in river flow and sediment regimes (…”