Coelho, C.O.A.¹, Borrego, C. ¹, Ferreira, A.J.D.^{1, 2}, Miranda, A.I. ¹, Keizer, J.J.¹, Laouina, A.³, Ritsema, C.J.⁴ & Regaya, K.⁵

1 = Department of Environment and Planning, Coastal Zone and Sea Research Centre, University of Aveiro, 3810-193 Aveiro, Portugal.
Tel.: +351 234 370831; FAX: + 351 234 429290; e-mail: coelho@dao.ua.pt
2 = Department of Exact and Environment Sciences, Escola Superior Agrária de Coimbra, IPC, Coimbra, Portugal.
3 = Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Université Mohammed V, Rabat, Morocco.
4 = Land Use and Soil Processes Team, ALTERRA Green World Research, Wageningen, The Netherlands.
5 = Institut National Agronomique de Tunisie, Tunis-Mahrajene, Tunisia.

 

The main aims of the CLIMED project (ICA3-1999-30026) are to improve the knowledge and understanding of the foreseeable climatic changes in the western Mediterranean and of their direct and indirect hydrological consequences; and to contribute to the development of management strategies and tools that allow adequate responses to the likely changes in water resources.

The CLIMED project involves four main stages. The first stage relates to climatic change assessment, and will use a Global Circulation Model and a Regional Circulation Model, assessed by synoptic and climatic field data to give a high resolution forecast both in terms of rainfall amounts and spatial and temporal distribution patterns for different atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

The second stage addresses the problem of climatic change impacts on fresh water resources. It studies the impact of various land uses on evapotranspiration and catchment runoff, by using small catchments of dominant land uses. Nevertheless, this scale is too small to identify any socio-economic constraints. Therefore, upscaling exercises will be performed based on statistical approaches to determine the frequency and magnitude of extreme (flood and drought) events. A further upscaling approach will be performed through the comparative analysis of the application of physical based model LISEM to different catchment scales. Since in the western Mediterranean traditional techniques of fresh water harvesting, storage and management are still important for local communities, an assessment of those techniques will be performed, as well as the impacts of climatic variation upon them. A further aim is to study the rational principles that can improve water management at a larger scale.

The third stage relates to the socio-economic dimension, and starts with the establishment of relations between fresh water availability and socio-economic impacts. This will be performed with data for the last decades on hydrological parameters and statistics on productions and revenues for the agriculture. Furthermore, an analysis of planning strategies and policies related with the water, together with interviews directed at the key actors, will provide the necessary framework to bottom up participation in the improvement of legislative and planning tools.

The final stage is related with the improvement of policy and planning tools, in addition to a conceptual model, designed to support decision-making systems, which will synthesise all the other stages, and will be composed by a risk assessment and a risk management model.