Abstract
Climate change is increasingly sensed by nations vulnerable to water-related disasters, and governments are acting to mitigate disasters and achieve sustainable development. Uncertainties in General Circulation Models’ (GCM) rainfall projections and seamless long-term hydrological simulations incorporating warming effects are major scientific challenges in assessing climate change impacts at the basin scale. Therefore, the Data Integration and Analysis System (DIAS) of Japan and the Water Energy Budget-based Rainfall-Runoff-Inundation model (WEB-RRI) were utilized to develop an integrated approach, which was then applied to the Mahaweli River Basin (MRB) in Sri Lanka to investigate climate change impacts on its hydro-meteorological characteristics. The results for the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP8.5) scenario from four selected GCMs showed that, with an average temperature increase of 1.1 °C over the 20 years in future (2026 to 2045), the basin will experience more extreme rainfall (increase ranging 204 to 476 mm/year) and intense flood disasters and receive sufficient water in the future climate (inflow increases will range between 11 m3/s to 57 m3/s). The socio-economic damage due to flood inundation will also increase in the future climate. However, qualitatively, the overall trend of model responses showed an increasing pattern in future meteorological droughts whereas there is uncertainty in hydrological droughts. Policymakers can utilize these results and react to implementing soft or hard countermeasures for future policymaking. The approach can be implemented for climate change impact assessment of hydro-meteorology in any other river basin worldwide.
Highlights
This paper presents an integrated approach for assessing climate change impacts on
The proposed approach has been applied to Mahaweli River Basin (MRB) in Sri Lanka to assess the impacts of
This paper presents an integrated approach for assessing climate change impacts on of satisfactorily simulating the past regional climate
Summary
Climate change enhanced by global warming is progressing faster than ever before [1]. Global warming is sensed most directly through water, as the phenomenon is inseparably connected to the water cycle, imposing threats on sustainable development, biodiversity, and ecosystems [2,3]. Climate-related hazards such as floods, storms, heatwaves, and droughts have caused the majority of disasters globally [2,4]. As far as risk is a function of threat, consequence, and vulnerability [5,6], increased threat causes abrupt damages to vulnerable societies. In 2015, the Sendai Framework for Disaster
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