CHARM: A Hydrologic Model for Land Use and Climate Change Studies in China

China is a country, which is rapidly changing and developing. The population is enormous and still increasing and the economy is growing at a rate that is one of the world's fastest. These factors are placing substantial stress on China's natural resources. Already, the best agricultural land is used and cities are expanding on top of some of this fertile land. Cities are growing so fast that improving and increasing electric and water infrastructure cannot keep up with demand. Much of Northern China is already in a situation of severe water stress. In order to understand how the resource stress will affect China's development, knowledge of the currently available resource in any area is necessary. Furthermore, possible changes in the resource availability in the future must be understood. These changes could be natural or anthropogenic ranging from climate change to changing land from pasture to irrigated farmland. If good data is available, the current resource availability is already known for all areas and a model can be used to investigate the impacts of any changes to the system. However, if good data is not available, a model must be used to gain both the current state and the impacts of changes. The latter is the method employed here to assess China's water availability. In this paper, a hydrologic model is developed to assess China's water availability. CHARM, for Climate and Human Activities sensitive Runoff Model, is developed to provide the runoff produced from rainfall throughout China on a 5 km x 5 km grid-cell resolution. The model is calibrated to average annual watershed runoff values. CHARM can then not only supply currently available surface water runoff for entire regions, but can supply runoff and runoff variability inter-annually and intra-annually for any area desired. Furthermore, it can be used to assess the impacts of land use and climate change on water resources. Here, the methodology of CHARM is developed and validated on two watersheds in the Yellow River Basin in China. It is then used to assess the current water resource supply in China. Finally, the strengths and weaknesses in the model and the modeling approach are discussed to assist the modeler in interpreting the results

Scarcity and abundance of land resources: Competing uses and the shrinking land resource base

Widespread hunger and rising global food demands (FAO, 2009) require better use of the world's water, land and ecosystems. For an estimated world population of about 9 billion in 2050, agricultural production has to increase by about 70 percent globally and by 100 percent in developing countries. An enormous effort is required to achieve the implied annual growth of nearly 1.5 percent (Bruinsma, 2009; Fischer, 2009; Godfray et al., 2010). The following policy challenges are of particular concern: Agricultural water withdrawals amount to 70 percent of total anthropogenic water use, and irrigated crops account for 40 percent of the world's total production (FAO, 2003). This makes the agriculture sector of critical social importance, responsible for massive environmental impacts and vulnerable to competition for land and water resources. Land and water uses for food production regularly compete with other ecosystem services. Ignoring such conflicts over resource use and tradeoffs can lead to unsustainable exploitation, environmental degradation and avoidable long-term social costs. Overcoming this limitation requires better understanding and management of competing uses of land, water and ecosystem services. This includes robust expansion of food and bio-energy production, sustaining regulating ecosystem functions, protecting and preserving global gene pools and enhancing terrestrial carbon pools. The prospect of meeting future water demand is limited by the declining possibilities of tapping additional sources of freshwater, and by the decreasing quality of water resources caused by pollution and waste. Freshwater resources are unevenly distributed, and many countries and locations suffer severe water scarcity (MEA, 2005). Climate change is happening, and further global warming in the coming decades seems unavoidable (IPCC, 2007). Food and water provision, land management, and the protection of nature face the immediate need to develop location-specific coping strategies, to use resources differently, to reduce systemic volatility and to safeguard the full range of ecosystem services. The range of land uses for human needs is limited by environmental factors including climate, topography, and soil characteristics. Land use is primarily determined by demographic and socio-economic drivers, cultural practices and political factors, such as land tenure, markets, institutions and agricultural policies. Good quality and availability of land and water resources, together with important socio-economic and institutional factors, is essential for food security. FAO, in collaboration with IIASA, has developed a system that enables rational land-use planning based on an inventory of land resources, and evaluation of biophysical limitations and production potentials. The Agro-Ecological Zones (AEZ) approach is based on robust principles of land evaluation. The current Global AEZ (GAEZ-2009) offers a standardized framework for the characterization of climate, soil and terrain conditions relevant to agricultural production, which can be applied at global to subnational levels

Developing a New Generation of Integrated World Water Scenarios

Global leaders at RIO+20 acknowledged the core role of water to achieving sustainable development, stressing the critical need to take decisive action today in order to sustainably meet global development objectives. The ramifications of the types of actions and decisions taken by water managers and other decision makers will impact sustainable development, given the inter linkages of water with poverty and hunger eradication, public health, food security, hydropower, agriculture and rural development. Indeed, in a world of increasing complexity, competing water demands and accelerating change, decision makers face increasing challenges in ensuring that their choices promote sustainable development. In an effort to address these challenges, a new initiative entitled Global Water Futures and Solutions: World Water Scenarios is being undertaken. Ultimately, the objective of the five-year project is to provide a set of robust strategies, policies, technologies and solutions to better inform decision making. It will do so through the development and analysis of a new generation of stakeholder informed global scenarios to gain a better understanding of the impact of different water-related decisions and choices on sustainable development and human well-being. The second generation of global water scenarios developed by the project will be based on stakeholder input and informed by regional, watershed and national scale scenario processes, exploring alternative futures and evaluating robust solutions. The project uniquely leverages expert knowledge from the global scientific community, water resources decision makers, practitioners and sector actors representing business, industry and technology. This expert knowledge will be garnered in several rounds of feedback with both qualitative scenario developers and quantitative modelers. Drivers and qualitative storylines will be analyzed quantitatively and consistently with a variety of sector models and multi-model ensembles to gain a better understanding of the meanings and impacts of the scenarios and this information will in turn inform the stakeholder groups to further enrich the scenarios. The project incorporates learning from and aims for consistency with other ongoing scenario processes, such as those of the IPCC AR5 and GEO5

Key Dimension 4: Environmental Waste Security

Asia and the Pacific shows a positive trend in strengthening water security with the number of water insecure countries dropping to 29 from 38 in 2013, according to this latest edition of the Asian Water Development Outlook (AWDO). Despite this progress, enormous challenges in water security remain. Asia is home to half of the world’s poorest people. Water for agriculture continues to consume 80% of water resources. A staggering 1.7 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. With a predicted population of 5.2 billion by 2050 and 22 megacities by 2030, the region’s finite water resources will be under enormous pressure—especially with increasing climate variability. Recent estimates indicate up to 3.4 billion people could be living in water-stressed areas of Asia by 2050. With a Sustainable Development Goal dedicated to water and sanitation for all, AWDO 2016 is a tool to help assess the region’s progress in meeting this ambitious target

Ion counting efficiencies at the IGISOL facility

At the IGISOL-JYFLTRAP facility, fission mass yields can be studied at high precision. Fission fragments from a U target are passing through a Ni foil and entering a gas filled chamber. The collected fragments are guided through a mass separator to a Penning trap where their masses are identified. This simulation work focuses on how different fission fragment properties (mass, charge and energy) affect the stopping efficiency in the gas cell. In addition, different experimental parameters are varied (e. g. U and Ni thickness and He gas pressure) to study their impact on the stopping efficiency. The simulations were performed using the Geant4 package and the SRIM code. The main results suggest a small variation in the stopping efficiency as a function of mass, charge and kinetic energy. It is predicted that heavy fragments are stopped about 9% less efficiently than the light fragments. However it was found that the properties of the U, Ni and the He gas influences this behavior. Hence it could be possible to optimize the efficiency.Comment: 52 pages, 44 figure

How to define (net) zero greenhouse gas emissions buildings: The results of an international survey as part of IEA EBC annex 72

The concept of (net) zero greenhouse gas (GHG) emission(s) buildings is gaining wide international attention and is considered to be the main pathway for achieving climate neutrality targets in the built environment. However, there is an increasing plethora of differing terms, definitions, and approaches emerging worldwide. To understand the current progress of the ongoing discussion, this study provides an overview of terms, definitions, and key features from a review of 35 building assessment approaches. The investigation identified that 13 voluntary frameworks from 11 countries are particularly characterised by net zero-carbon/GHG emissions performance targets, which are then subject to a more detailed analysis. The review was organised in the context of the project IEA EBC Annex 72 on “Assessing Life Cycle Related Environmental Impacts Caused by Buildings”, which involves researchers from over 25 countries worldwide. In the current dynamic political surroundings and ongoing scientific debate, only an initial overview of this topic can be presented. However, providing typologies and fostering transparency would be instrumental in delivering clarity, limiting misunderstanding, and avoiding potential greenwashing. To this end, this article categorises the most critical methodological options—i.e., system boundaries for both operational and embodied GHG emissions, the type of GHG emission factor for electricity use, the approach to the “time” aspect, and the possibilities of GHG emission compensation—into a comprehensive framework for clarifying or setting (net) zero GHG emission building definitions in a more systematic way. The article concludes that although variations in the existing approaches will continue to exist, certain minimum directions should be considered for the future development of harmonised (net) zero GHG emissions building frameworks. As a minimum, it is recommended to extend the usual scope of the operational energy use balance. At the same time, minimum requirements must also be set for embodied GHG emissions even if they are not considered in the carbon/GHG emissions balance

Development of Regional Economic Supply Curves for Surface Water Resources and Climate Change Assessments: A Case Study of China

Recently, a number of reports on global renewable water resources have been produced. These studies generally report the average annual renewable water resources for large regions or countries based on runoff from rivers and streams. These average resource data are compared with estimated current and future water demand to determine which regions and countries could be facing serious water scarcity problems. Microeconomic analysis, however, suggests that increasing the supply leads to higher costs and could thereby reduce demand. Furthermore, the total renewable water resources are not 100% usable. The global studies to date have not systematically considered the costs of developing and supplying water, the potential water loses due to development, or the relationship between supply and demand. This report aims to improve the analysis of global and regional water resources by developing a methodology to study climate change impacts on the supply of water from storage in large watershed regions of China. There are four major steps in developing the supply curves from regional reservoir storage. In step one, the Climate- and Human Activities-sensitive Runoff Model (CHARM), a spatially explicit hydrologic model that is sensitive to land-use and climate changes, is developed to use climate databases to produce time series runoff calibrated to the annual averages. In step two, a methodology is developed to calculate evaporation from regional reservoir storage, incorporating hundreds or thousands of reservoirs for areas where little reservoir information is available. In the third step, the storage- yield curve is calculated based on the CHARM results and the evaporation calculated from the area-volume curves developed in step two. Finally, reservoir storage cost curves are developed based on watershed physiography and reservoir size. These cost curves are then combined with the storage-yield curve to produce a curve representing regional water supply from storage. This regional water supply curve methodology is applied to examine the impacts of climate change on the water supply from storage in nine major watershed regions in China. The general circulation model scenarios used produce results suggesting that China will benefit from increased runoff in regions of water scarcity and high demand. However, the increased evaporation and flow variability will take its toll in some regions, increasing the frequency of floods and droughts and thereby the cost of and need for storage in those regions