The Impacts of Climate Change on Regional Water Resources and Agriculture in Africa

Strzepek, Kenneth ; McCluskey, Alyssa

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: AGRICULTURE;    ANNUAL RUNOFF;    ANTARCTICA;    ARID AREAS;    BASINS;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-4290
RP-ID  :  WPS4290

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper summarizes the methods andfindings of the hydrological assessment component of theproject studying likely impacts of climate change on waterresources and agriculture in Africa. The first phase of thestudy used a version of a conceptual rainfall-runoff modelcalled WatBal (Water Balance) applied to gridded data tosimulate changes in soil moisture and runoff across thewhole continent of Africa rather than to any particularcatchment or water resource system. The model inputs werethe climate variables of the 1961-90 climatology andphysiological parameters (such as soil properties and landuse) derived from global datasets for each of the 0.5 degreelatitude/longitude cells across the continent. The primarymodel output comprised a time series (monthly time step) ofsimulated runoff for all the grid cells for each of thedistricts in the countries of interest. The second phase ofthe study extended the hydrology analyses to update theabove hydroclimatic series to the year 2000 using updatedinput data. To ascertain the possible impacts of climatechange within the districts being investigated this studyused synthetic or GCM-based climate change scenarios asinput to the WatBal model. The WatBal model was used todetermine the impact of these different scenarios on runoffand actual evaporation and hence flow in the districts understudy. The generated hydroclimatic series and scenarioanalyses were used as inputs into various Ricardianregressions in other analyses measuring likely impacts ofclimate change on the agricultural economies of Africa.