CLISWELN

Climate Services for the Water-Energy-Land Nexus

ERA4CSClimate services

We need to understand what are the factors that imperil the economy, factors that will play a role together with climate change, in order to transform climate scenario data into information useful for planning and decision making for stakeholders. In this context, drought risk plays an important role, as we saw during the summer of 2018 in Germany. This project aims to provide climate services for drought affected sectors and systems of
sectors, like agriculture, forestry and cities, using climate change projection data in integrated models and decision-making tools in order to analyze the complex waterenergy-land-food nexus (see Figure 1). CLISWELN analyses the drought because it has a significant impact on water supplies, but in socio-economic terms, a drought is the imbalance between supply and demand, so it is necessary to understand what demand factors play a role, together with climate change, and to analyse the entire system of demand and supply including all the involved sectors in each case study.

CLISWELN is producing tools for urban planning and information for decision makers in agriculture, forestry and citiesso that they can understand the implications of management decisions under climate change scenarios.
CLISWELN links forest land use to water supply availability for cities and greenhouse gas emissions from additional sources of water.In this way it introduces an approach to assure that adaptation options advised by climate services do not increase greenhouse gas emissions.
CLISWELN provides insights about the resilience of the tourism sectorto climate change in areas with high pressures for urban development that could significantly increase water demands, in a context where the nexus between water, cities and agriculture is crucial to understand how to adapt to longer and more intense droughts.
In some case studies we have been able to install field meteorological equipmentthat will improve the quality of the research performed by providing better data to calibrate the results of the hydrological simulations.

About

To exemplify the societal impact of the project, the information for urban water supply planning in the Sacele river basin in Romania involves stakeholders from a water treatment plant linked to a dam that is used for urban water provision for Brasov, an important city; in this dam there are sedimentation problems and the dam managers and urban water suppliers are truly eager to see our final results and understand the implications of co-designed land use scenarios and climate change in the sedimentation problem.

Roger Cremades

LPI of the project

I am Dr. Roger Cremades, the leading investigator of CLISWELN, you can drop me an email at roger.cremades@hzg.de. I envisioned this project when droughts were not yet perceived in the media as a present major risk in Germany. I am mostly interested in realistically integrating all economic sectors and their nexus across resources (water, land, energy) in socioeconomic tools for climate change adaptation and sustainability. For me 2+2 sometimes can sum more than 4, because the real world is a complex system full of synergies and feedback loops. Traditional methods exclude this complexity. My goal is to improve existing practices by focusing on complex systems applied to climate services.

Project consortium

University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
The Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht Centre for Materials and Coastal Research
Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications
National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry Marin Dracea

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Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht Zentrum für Material- und Küstenforschung GmbH, particularly its Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), is the lead partner and focuses on the interactions of cities with droughts under climate change in a case study in a Mediterranean tourism hub in Spain. Universität für Bodenkultur Wien, Austria, runs an agricultural model that reproduces land, water and energy use in agriculture and applies it to a case study in Austria. Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications, Spain, does the hydrological simulations for the Spanish case study. And finally, the National Institute for Research and Development in Forestry “Marin Dracea”, Romania, prepared a case study linking forestry land use with urban resilience to droughts. The stakeholders in
the project are mostly in the urban planning, water management, and agriculture and forestry sectors, depending on each case study.

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Parent programme

ERA4CS

European Research Area for Climate Services

ERA-NET Cofund for Climate Services - This ERA-NET Consortium has been designed to boost the development of efficient Climate Services in Europe, by supporting research for developing better tools, methods and standards on how to produce, transfer, communicate and use reliable climate information to cope with current and future climate variability.

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