Training on Water Resources Management: Climate and Socioeconomic Change Adaptation in Transboundary Basins

This three-day workshop (running October 12, 14, and 21) is organized in the context of a cooperation between EEPSEA, the Environment for Development Center (EfD-Vietnam), and IIASA (WAT Research Group). The virtual workshop will strengthen participants’ knowledge of the development and use of models and systems analysis approaches to better understand current and future issues surrounding water resource management under climate change involving climate, hydrological, and economic modeling tools. The workshop will involve a mixture of presentations and practical ‘hands-on’ sessions with selected models to contextualize the work in the Southeast Asian region and its specific circumstances.

Learning objectives:

• Participants will sufficiently understand the processes involved in interdisciplinary research on water resources management under climate change involving climate, hydrological, and economic modeling tools.
• Participants will have a basic/theoretical understanding of climate and hydrological modeling and hands-on hydro-economic modeling experience.
• Participants will have an understanding of an interdisciplinary research proposal to evaluate water resources issues under climate change.
• Participants will have a basic/theoretical understanding of hydrological modeling with the Community Water Model (CWatM), hands-on experience in hydro-economic modeling, and use a basic setting for the Mekong River.

Modeling activities:

1. The Community Water Model (CWATM) is an open source model that examines how future water demand will evolve in response to socioeconomic change and how water availability will change in response to climate. The model enables the assessment of water supply and human and environmental water demands at both global and regional levels, and is the first step towards developing an integrated modeling framework that will be able to provide vital information to decision- and policymakers.
    
2. The Global Hydro-Economic Model (ECHO) is a bottom-up system analysis framework that can be used to develop integrated, long-term planning strategies for the water system. It can be used to inform the design of cost-effective and sustainable water policy decisions and to address the impacts of future changing socioeconomic and climatic conditions on water systems.
    
3. Global Agro-Ecological Zones (GAEZ v4). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and IIASA have cooperated over several decades to develop and implement the Agro-Ecological Zones modeling framework and associated databases, which rely on well-established land evaluation principles to assess natural resources for finding suitable agricultural land utilization options. The framework identifies resource limitations and opportunities based on plant eco-physiological characteristics, climatic and edaphic requirements of crops, and it uses these to evaluate suitability and production potentials for individual crop types under specific input and management conditions.