Water and Global Change Project
The Land Use Change and Agriculture (LUC) Program's integrated project on Water and Global Change (WATCH) brings together 25 partner institutions in the hydrological, water resources and climate communities. The aim is to

• analyse, quantify and predict the components of current and future global water cycles and related water resources states,
• evaluate uncertainties, and
• clarify the overall vulnerability of global water resources as they relate to the main societal and economic sectors.

The WATCH project will:

• analyse and describe the current global water cycle, especially causal chains leading to observable changes in extremes (droughts and floods);
• evaluate how the global water cycle and its extremes respond to future drivers of global change (including greenhouse gas release and land cover change);
• evaluate feedbacks in the coupled system as they affect the global water cycle;
• evaluate uncertainties in predicting coupled climate-hydrological- land-use models using a combination of model ensembles and observations;
• develop an enhanced (modelling) framework to assess the future vulnerability of water as a resource.

In relation to water/climate related vulnerabilities and risks of the major water related sectors, such as agriculture, nature and utilities (energy, industry and drinking water sector), the WATCH project will

• provide comprehensive quantitative and qualitative assessments and predictions of the vulnerability of the water, resources and water-/climate-related vulnerabilities and risks for the 21st century,
• collaborate intensively with the key leading research groups on water cycle and water resources in USA and Japan,
• collaborate intensively in dissemination of its scientific results with major research programmes worldwide (WCRP, IGBP),
• collaborate intensively in dissemination of its practical and applied results with major water resources and water management platforms and professional organisations worldwide (WWC, IWA) and at a scale of 5 selected river basins in Europe.

IIASA's Land Use Change and Agriculture program will provide global spatial data on key components of the water cycle from 1900-2100 concerning agricultural, industrial and domestic uses, and provide modeling techniques and methodologies for scaling and analyzing the data, producing scenarios of the past and future, assessing the impacts of global change and quantifying uncertainties. The methodologies developed by the program and by the entire WATCH project will enhance the modeling of water resources within the program's land use and agricultural modeling methodologies, helping it depict even more realistically global land and water resource issues and potential solutions.

For more information, visit the WATCH website.

Responsible for this page: Elisabeth Kawczynski
Last updated: 09 Nov 2009