An Economic Assessment of Local Farm Multi-Purpose Surface Water Retention Systems under Future Climate Uncertainty

Abstract

Abstract:Regions dependent on agricultural production are concerned about the uncertainty associated with climate change. Extreme drought and flooding events are predicted to occur with greater frequency, requiring mitigation strategies to reduce their negative impacts. Multi-purpose local farm water retention systems can reduce water stress during drought periods by supporting irrigation. The retention systems' capture of excess spring runoff and extreme rainfall events also reduces flood potential downstream. Retention systems may also be used for biomass production and nutrient retention. A sub-watershed scale retention system was analysed using a dynamic simulation model to predict the economic advantages in the future. Irrigated crops using water from the downstream reservoir at Pelly's Lake, Manitoba, Canada, experienced a net decrease in gross margin in the future due to the associated irrigation and reservoir infrastructure costs. However, the multi-purpose benefits of the retention system at Pelly's Lake of avoided flood damages, nutrient retention, carbon sequestration, and biomass production provide an economic benefit of $25,507.00/hectare of retention system/year. Multi-purpose retention systems under future climate uncertainty provide economic and environmental gains when used to avoid flood damages, for nutrient retention and carbon sequestration, and biomass production. The revenue gained from these functions can support farmers willing to invest in irrigation while providing economic and environmental benefits to the region.

Representation and improved parameterization of reservoir operation in hydrological and land-surface models

“…The combination of MODIS and satellite radar altimetry allows deriving storage-area-depth relationships (Gao et al, 2012;Andreadis et al, 2007;Zhang et al, 2014;Yoon and Beighley, 2015). The planned SWOT (2021) mission (Garambois and Monnier, 2015;Biancamaria et al, 2016) will increase the availability of water-level data for smaller rivers (with widths going down to 100 m) that can be potentially converted to discharge to estimate reservoir inflows and downstream reservoir releases.…”

“…In this work, our focus is on the representation of dam and reservoir operations in CMs and LSMs, particularly when used at large scales. While there has been tremendous progress in the last decades in modeling the operation and management of reservoir systems at local to regional scales (e.g., Castelletti et al, 2010;Chang et al, 2010;Fraternali et al, 2012;Razavi et al, 2012;Asadzadeh et al, 2014;Guo et al, 2013), a gap still exists between the methodologies applied for local-and regionalscale reservoir operations and management and the representation of reservoir operation in Earth system models, particularly in LSMs. This gap is due to a twofold challenge.…”

“…complex reservoir operations and water resource management problems (e.g., Razavi et al, 2014;Asadzadeh et al, 2014). A systematic integration of such models into largescale hydrological modeling has been reported in Burek et al (2013), as implemented in the LISFLOOD hydrological model, and in Neitsch et al (2005), as implemented in the SWAT model.…”

“…MESH is Environment and Climate Change Canada's landsurface-hydrology modeling system (Pietroniro et al, 2007) and has been widely used in different parts of Canada (Davison et al, 2016;Haghnegahdar et al, 2017;Yassin et al, 2017;Berry et al, 2017). MESH is a grid-based modeling system composed of three components: (1) the Canadian Land Surface Scheme (CLASS; Verseghy, 1991;Verseghy et al, 1993), (2) lateral movement of surface (overland) runoff and subsurface water (interflow) to the channel system within a grid cell, and (3) hydrological routing using WATROUTE from the WATFLOOD hydrological model (Kouwen et al, 1993).…”

Financing High Performance Climate Adaptation in Agriculture: Climate Bonds for Multi-Functional Water Harvesting Infrastructure on the Canadian Prairies

“…For example, a dynamic simulation model of a DWH climate adaptation system was recently conducted for a portion of a watershed downstream of Pelly's Lake, Manitoba, Canada. This simulation model integrates physical variables related to the landscape, energy balance, moisture fluxes, hydrologic cycle with operational climate forecasting tools to understand the multi-purpose benefits of the system and to estimate their economic value [6]. Furthermore, the use of downscaled climate data and quantification of future climate impact scenarios with and without the system increases certainty about the future success of the system, beyond the requirements of the CBS criteria.…”