Integrated energy-water-land nexus planning in the Colorado River Basin (Argentina)

Abstract

Integrated energy-water-land (EWL) planning promotes synergies and avoids conflicts in ways that sector-specific planning approaches cannot. Many important decisions that influence emerging EWL nexus issues are implemented at regional (e.g., large river basin, electricity grid) and sub-regional (e.g., small river basin, irrigation district) scales. However, actual implementation of integrated planning at these scales has been limited. Simply collecting and visualizing data and interconnections across multiple sectors and sub-regions in a single modeling platform is a unique endeavor in many regions. This study introduces and applies a novel approach to linking together multiple sub-regions in a single platform to characterize and visualize EWL resource use, EWL system linkages within and among sub-regions, and the EWL nexus implications of future policies and investments. This integrated planning methodology is applied in the water-stressed Colorado River Basin in Argentina, which is facing increasing demands for agricultural and fossil fuel commodities. Guided by stakeholders, this study seeks to inform basin planning activities by characterizing and visualizing (1) the basin’s current state of EWL resources, (2) the linkages between sectors within and among basin sub-regions, and (3) the EWL nexus implications of planned future agricultural development activities. Results show that water scarcity, driven in part by human demands that have historically reached 60% of total surface water supply, poses a substantial constraint to economic development in the basin. The Colorado basin has the potential to serve as a testbed for crafting novel and generalizable sub-regional EWL planning approaches capable of informing the EWL planning dialogue globally.

Drivers of Future Physical Water Scarcity and Its Economic Impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean

“…The modeling approach used in this work allows us to explore the important feedbacks across the energy‐water‐land system affecting water scarcity and to discover sub‐regional insights related to both physical water scarcity and the economic impacts of global water stress. There is an increasing push to provide global and basin boundary conditions such as those generated in this study in basin and sub‐basin scale planning contexts (Giuliani et al., 2022; Wild, Khan, Hejazi, et al., 2021). The outputs generated in this work can be leveraged directly for future basin‐specific studies.…”

Emerging Themes and Future Directions of Multi-Sector Nexus Research and Implementation

“…The number of studies on the nexus has grown exponentially since 2011 (Bazilian et al, 2011;Cairns and Krzywoszynska, 2016;Wichelns, 2017;Newell et al, 2019;Opejin et al, 2020) with various definitions of the nexus, covering different sectors, stakeholders and spatio-temporal scales (Siddiqi and Anadon, 2011;Karlberg et al, 2015;Keskinen et al, 2015;King and Jaafar, 2015;Sušnik, 2018;Roggema and Yan, 2019;Wada et al, 2019;Bakhshianlamouki et al, 2020;Imasiku and Ntagwirumugara, 2020;Khan et al, 2020;Benites-Lazaro et al, 2021;Elagib et al, 2021;Lazaro et al, 2021;Wild et al, 2021). The resulting ambiguity of the definition and scope of the nexus has been identified as a key barrier to operationalizing nexus methods in practice (Endo et al, 2017;Weitz et al, 2017;Wichelns, 2017;Albrecht et al, 2018;Urbinatti et al, 2020a;Urbinatti et al, 2020a;Hogeboom et al, 2021).…”

The Implications of Global Change for the Co‐Evolution of Argentina's Integrated Energy‐Water‐Land Systems

“…In this study, we used GCAM-LAC, which is based on GCAM version 5.1 (Calvin et al, 2019), but with several additional input files that improve the fidelity of EWL projections for the LAC region. GCAM-LAC has been deployed in several other studies (da Silva et al, 2021;Delgado et al, 2020;Wild, Khan, et al, 2021). As summarized in Section S1 and Figure S1, GCAM-LAC includes improved regional EWL reference scenarios for Argentina, Colombia, and Uruguay, as well as an array of global improvements, such as updated technology cost data reflecting the potential for increased deployment of wind power, solar power, and battery electric vehicle technology.…”

“…These insights can provide meaningful inputs to ongoing planning discussions in these basins, which already face an array of challenges. For example, the Colorado basin is facing increasing water demands associated with rapidly evolving sectors, such as municipal water demand for Buenos Aires, a growing oil and gas industry, and a large but still growing agricultural industry (Wild, Khan, et al, 2021). Moderate-to-severe water scarcity in the basin could create water-related conflicts among sectors and will require careful management of multi-purpose water and land in the basin.…”

“…More detailed modeling tools are required to take the next step toward evaluating the dynamic EWL implications of various influences within these regions, as well as to evaluate alternative interventions such as infrastructure and institutional investments. For example, the Metis model (Khan, Wild, Vernon, et al, 2020) is designed specifically to interact with GCAM and its suite of downscaling tools to better understand nexus dynamics at sub-national scale (e.g., within river basins), and has been applied in the Colorado basin for this purpose (Wild, Birnbaum, et al, 2021;Wild, Khan, et al, 2021). Similar studies of more detailed EWL interactions within river basins have been conducted in Asia (Vinca et al, 2020) and Africa (Castelletti et al, 2020), though it remains a challenge to fully project the IAM-based implications of global change onto these river basin models to provide enhanced boundary conditions (Vinca, et al, 2021).…”