Adaptation strategies to climate change and climate variability: A comparative study between seven contrasting river basins

Adaptation strategies to climate change and climate variability to enhance food quantity and security and environmental quality and security have been explored for seven contrasting basins in the context of the ADAPT project. For the seven basins as much as possible established modeling frameworks were used, where the focus was on the linkage between field scale models to explore farm scale water management and basin scale models dealing with water resources issues. Climate change projections were scaled to local conditions where the HadCM3 and the ECHAM4 General Circulation Models as well as the seven basins required different adjustment factors in this downscaling. For the seven basins selected, impacts and adaptation strategies at field scale indicated that overall food production will increase in the future as a result of enhanced CO2 levels, but that variation in yields will increase too. Linking this to the basin scale and including also environment focused adaptation strategies showed for the one example basin presented here, Walawe in Sri Lanka, that food security was more difficult to maintain than total food production and that environmental quality can be maintained by selecting the appropriate adaptation strategies. Results from the relatively complex modeling framework were converted to easily understandable graphs that have been used in discussions regarding adaptation strategies with various stakeholders.