Soft path water management adaptations to climate change: the SO-WATCH project

The SO-WATCH (SOft path WATer management adaptation to CHanging climate) project (Fondazione Cariplo, grant n° 2015-0220) aims to overcome the limits of traditional hard-path solutions to cope with water scarcity (e.g. large-scale infrastructures) through the development and testing of a novel decision-analytic framework to assist decision-makers in designing and assessing alternative soft-path measures (e.g. better use of information, introduction of efficient coordination mechanisms among water sectors, low-cost and reversible infrastructural interventions, smart economics). The framework is applied to the Como lake river basin, that includes a large regulated lake, an extended upstream area characterized by many hydropower plants, and a vast irrigation-fed cultivated area downstream. The project is structured into four stages: calibration and validation of physical models of the system sub-components; development of agent-based behavioural models to represent human decisions and their effects on the system; construction of hydro-climatic and socio-techno-economic scenarios; design of soft-path adaptation measures to improve the multi-sector water use under the current and projected scenarios. Some preliminary results are: (1) simulation of the main hydrological processes in the upstream catchment contributing to the lake inflows under current and future climate conditions; (2) implementation of a new spatialized agricultural drought index to provide measures of the evolution of this phenomenon to irrigation managers and farmers.