Quantifying the potential for reservoirs to secure future surface water yields in the world's largest river basins

15145 16 80922 2 224065 document 80922 Liu_et_al_accepted_ERL_2018.pdf application/pdf c5b27b503415a934ffb396e8f443e0dc MD5 1771766 2018-02-27 08:06:04 https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/15145/1/Liu_et_al_accepted_ERL_2018.pdf 15145 1 1 application/pdf text en public cc_by

Liu_et_al_accepted_ERL_2018.pdf

accepted 80923 1 224072 document 80923 indexcodes.txt text/x-asm f9ef407b8931a5f39c396a56ed32c407 MD5 15364 2018-02-27 08:25:59 https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/15145/2/indexcodes.txt 15145 2 2 text/x-asm other Generate index codes conversion from text to indexcodes en public

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http://eprints.org/relation/isVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/80922 http://eprints.org/relation/isVolatileVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/80922 http://eprints.org/relation/issmallThumbnailVersionOf https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/document/80922 archive 353 disk0/00/01/51/45 2018-02-28 13:01:23 2021-08-27 17:29:58 2018-02-28 13:01:23 article show Liu L. 8970 Parkinson S. 2028 0000-0002-4753-5198 Gidden M. 2108 0000-0003-0687-414X Byers E. 2115 0000-0003-0349-5742 Satoh Y. 2080 Riahi K. 1696 0000-0001-7193-3498 Forman B. Quantifying the potential for reservoirs to secure future surface water yields in the world's largest river basins pub prog_ene prog_wat prog_ysp global change; long-term strategic water resources planning; reliability; reservoir capacity expansion; storage-yield curve Surface water reservoirs provide us with reliable water supply, hydropower generation, flood control and recreation services. Yet, reservoirs also cause flow fragmentation in rivers and lead to flooding of upstream areas, thereby displacing existing land-use activities and ecosystems. Anticipated population growth and development coupled with climate change in many regions of the globe suggests a critical need to assess the potential for future reservoir capacity to help balance rising water demands with long-term water availability. Here, we assess the potential of large-scale reservoirs to provide reliable surface water yields while also considering environmental flows within 235 of the world’s largest river basins. Maps of existing cropland and habitat conservation zones are integrated with spatially-explicit population and urbanization projections from the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) to identify regions unsuitable for increasing water supply by exploiting new reservoir storage. Results show that even when maximizing the global reservoir storage to its potential limit (~4.3-4.8 times the current capacity), firm yields would only increase by about 50% over current levels. However, there exist large disparities across different basins. The majority of river basins in North America are found to gain relatively little firm yield by increasing storage capacity, whereas basins in Southeast Asia display greater potential for expansion as well as proportional gains in firm yield under multiple uncertainties. Parts of Europe, the United States and South America show relatively low reliability of maintaining current firm yields under future climate change, whereas most of Asia and higher latitude regions display comparatively high reliability. Findings from this study highlight the importance of incorporating different factors, including human development, land-use activities, and climate change, over a time span of multiple decades and across a range of different scenarios when quantifying available surface water yields and the potential for reservoir expansion. 2018-04 published Institute of Physics Publishing (IOP) 10.1088/1748-9326/aab2b5 2796 225 103 2585 268 250 public Environmental Research Letters 13 4 e044026 TRUE 1748-9326 FALSE no info:eu-repo/semantics/article