The impact of climate change on the benefit of a rain barrel sharing network

•This study examined the effect of a shared network of rain barrels in a sample community with four prospective users.•An individual RWHS could potentially benefit from sharing networks by reducing the total storage size.•The shared network can be more beneficial under a climate change condition.•For higher reliabilities, the benefit from a network increases under the future climate change scenarios.•The results imply the need to establish rain barrel sharing networks under climate change as an adaptation strategy.

The assessment of the impact of climate change depends not only on quantitative changes in precipitation but also system characteristics that can be changed and enhanced. This study investigated the effect of building the shared network of a rainwater harvesting system as an adaptation to climate change scenarios. The performance of a rain barrel network under three climate change scenarios and three global circulation models (GCM) is examined. A sample community composed of four prospective users with individual storage is tested with various forms of shared connections. Most importantly, the results show that the benefit from shared rain barrels greatly increases under the climate change conditions compared with the historical rainfall data. Especially, for high reliabilities, the results indicate that the benefit of a rain barrel network increases under future climate change scenarios, whereas it does not show apparent improvement for low reliabilities. However, the performance of a rain barrel network is highly dependent on location and climate change scenarios. In contrast, the GCM does not considerably affect the performance of the shared network. The results of this study highlight the needs to establish sharing networks of rainwater harvesting systems under the climate change conditions, which would significantly increase the benefit of the entire community.