The impact of climate change policy on the risk of water stress in southern and eastern Asia
Name
Gao_2018_Environ._Res._Lett._13_064039.pdf
Description
Published version
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1.62 MB
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c54f58517c8b75d155676656d4955f48
Author(s)
Gao, Xiang
Schlosser, C Adam
Fant, Charles
Strzepek, Kenneth
Date Issued
June 1, 2018
Journal
Environmental Research Letters
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Xiang Gao et al 2018 Environ. Res. Lett. 13 064039
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The adequacy of freshwater resources remains a critical challenge for a sustainable and growing society. We present a self-consistent risk-based assessment of water availability and use under future climate change and socioeconomic growth by midcentury across southern and eastern Asia (SEA). We employ large ensemble scenarios from an integrated modeling framework that are consistent across the spectrum of regional climate, population, and economic projections. We find socioeconomic growth contributes to an increase in water stress across the entire ensemble. However, climate change drives the ensemble central tendency toward an increase in water stress in China but a reduction in India, with a considerable spread across the ensemble. Nevertheless, the most deleterious unabated climate-change impact is a low probability but salient extreme increase in water stress over China and India. In these outcomes, annual withdrawals will routinely exceed water-storage capacity. A modest greenhouse gas mitigation pathway eliminates the likelihood of these extreme outcomes and also benefits hundreds of millions of people at risk to various levels of water stress increase. Over SEA we estimate an additional 200 million people under threat of facing at least heavily water-stressed conditions from climate change and socioeconomic growth, but the mitigation scenario reduces the additional population-under-threat by 30% (60 million). Nevertheless, there remains a 1-in-2 chance that 100 million people across SEA experience a 50% increase in water stress and a 1-in-10 chance they experience a doubling of water stress. Therefore, widespread adaptive measures may be required over the coming decades to meet these unavoidable risks in water shortfalls.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Joint Program on the Science & Policy of Global Change
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/aaca9e
