CLIMB

Project Details

Progress beyond the state-of-the-art

Innovative scientific and technological measures will play an important role in addressing projected climatic changes and their impacts on the freshwater resources of the Mediterranean region. Developing and disseminating the best research and technology is an imperative given the potentially grave socio-economic repercussions of these impacts (water scarcity and degradation, displacement of populations, political conflicts, etc). The proposed project will advance the state-of-the-art in several areas connected to hydrology and water resources management, including: geodatamanagement, hydrogeophysics, remote sensing, climate model auditing and downscaling, hydrological modeling, assessment of uncertainty, vulnerability and risk and water conflicts

In its 4-year design, CLIMB, a network of 20 partners from 9 countries (Germany, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, France, Italy, Austria, Palest. Adm. Areas, Canada), analyzed ongoing and future climate induced changes in hydrological budgets and extremes across the Mediterranean and neighboring regions. The work plan was targeted to selected river or aquifer catchments, where the consortium employed a combination of novel field monitoring and remote sensing concepts, data assimilation, integrated hydrologic modeling and socioeconomic factor analyses to reduce existing uncertainties in climate change impact analysis. Advanced climate scenario analysis was utilized and available ensembles of regional climate model simulations were audited and downscaled. This process provided the drivers for an ensemble of hydrological models with different degrees of complexity in terms of process description and level of integration. The results of hydrological modeling and socio-economic factor analysis were applied to develop a risk model via a spatial Vulnerability and Risk Assessment Tool, serving as a platform for dissemination of project results, including communication and planning for local and regional stakeholders. An im¬portant output of the research in the individual study sites is the development of recommendations for an improved monitoring and modeling strategy for climate change impact assessment.