Abstract
Changes in climatic conditions will directly affect the quality and quantity of water resources. Further on, they will affect them indirectly through adaptation in land use which ultimately influences diffuse nutrient emissions to rivers and therefore potentially the compliance with good ecological status according to the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD). We present an integrated impact modelling framework (IIMF) to track and quantify direct and indirect pollution impacts along policy-economy-climate-agriculture-water interfaces. The IIMF is applied to assess impacts of climatic and socio-economic drivers on agricultural land use (crop choices, farming practices and fertilization levels), river flows and the risk for exceedance of environmental quality standards for determination of the ecological water quality status in Austria. This article also presents model interfaces as well as validation procedures and results of single models and the IIMF with respect to observed state variables such as land use, river flow and nutrient river loads. The performance of the IIMF for calculations of river nutrient loads (120 monitoring stations) shows a Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency of 0.73 for nitrogen and 0.51 for phosphorus. Most problematic is the modelling of phosphorus loads in the alpine catchments dominated by forests and mountainous landscape. About 63% of these catchments show a deviation between modelled and observed loads of 30% and more. In catchments dominated by agricultural production, the performance of the IIMF is much better as only 30% of cropland and 23% of permanent grassland dominated areas have a deviation of >30% between modelled and observed loads. As risk of exceedance of environmental quality standards is mainly recognized in catchments dominated by cropland, the IIMF is well suited for assessing the nutrient component of the WFD ecological status.
Highlights
Climate change is one of the major challenges of our time and adds considerable stress to the human society and environment (UNEP, 2010)
We presented an integrated impact modelling framework (IIMF) for assessing regionalized impacts of climatic and socio-economic drivers on choices of crops, fertilization intensity and soil management as well as on river runoff and river vulnerability for exceedance of EQS for assessment of the nutrient component of the good ecological water quality status
Since little scientific information has been available on the context of climatic and socio-economic change and its consequences for land use, water resources and the ecological status of surface waters (Dunn et al, 2012), this IIMF provides a useful interdisciplinary methodology for evaluating these interactions at regional scale with Austria as example
Summary
Climate change is one of the major challenges of our time and adds considerable stress to the human society and environment (UNEP, 2010). A change in climate is restricted to a shift of seasonal weather patterns like increasing winter precipitation in Northern Europe and decreasing summer precipitation in Southern and Central Europe, but can lead to more frequent occurrence of extreme weather events such as intense rainfall or drought (IPCC, 2007; Jentsch and Beierkuhnlein, 2008; IPCC, 2014). The most important changes in the climate system related to water resources are increases in air temperature, shifts in precipitation patterns and snow cover, and potentially an increase in the frequency of flooding and droughts (EEA, 2007). For the decades to come, increasing precipitation in winter and decreasing precipitation in summer as well as increases in extreme weather events are expected (APCC, 2014). Uncertainties and spatial heterogeneity are large, in the alpine region (Gobiet et al, 2014)
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