Sustainability of Small Reservoirs and Large Scale Water Availability Under Current Conditions and Climate Change

Semi-arid river basins often rely on reservoirs for water supply. Small reservoirs may impact on large-scale water availability both by enhancing availability in a distributed sense and by subtracting water for large downstream user communities, e.g. served by large reservoirs. Both of these impacts...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inWater resources management Vol. 25; no. 12; pp. 3017 - 3026
Main Authors Krol, Maarten S., de Vries, Marjella J., van Oel, Pieter R., de Araújo, José Carlos
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01.09.2011
Springer
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Atmospheric Sciences
Basins
Case studies
Civil Engineering
Climate change
Earth and Environmental Science
Earth Sciences
Earth, ocean, space
Environment
Environmental impact
Exact sciences and technology
Geotechnical Engineering & Applied Earth Sciences
Hydrogeology
Hydrologic cycle
Hydrology
Hydrology. Hydrogeology
Hydrology/Water Resources
Precipitation
Reservoirs
River basins
River networks
Runoff
Simulation
Studies
Topography
Water availability
Water resources
Water resources management
Water supply
South America
Brazil
Climate change
Semi-arid
Water availability
Small reservoirs
rivers
reservoirs
water supply
case studies
water
sustainable development
currents
water resource management
climate change
communities
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Semi-arid river basins often rely on reservoirs for water supply. Small reservoirs may impact on large-scale water availability both by enhancing availability in a distributed sense and by subtracting water for large downstream user communities, e.g. served by large reservoirs. Both of these impacts of small reservoirs are subject to climate change. Using a case-study on North-East Brazil, this paper shows that climate change impacts on water availability may be severe, and impacts on distributed water availability from small reservoirs may exceed impacts on centralised water availability from large reservoirs. Next, the paper shows that the effect of small reservoirs on water availability from large reservoirs may be significant, and increase both in relative and absolute sense under unfavourable climate change.
ISSN:0920-4741
1573-1650
DOI:10.1007/s11269-011-9787-0