Hadush Meresa

• Water resources (management)
• Economic change and vulnerability
• Agriculture, land use, climate change

• Ethiopia

Water extreme risk modelling and management under the influence of environmental change

Both water extremes (Floods and droughts) and environment (land and climate) can rapidly wipe out significant quantity of food from farm land and store. Therefore, food security requires an in-depth understanding of water extremes and environmental changes, and its implication for food availability and access. The water extreme events and its frequencies are getting aggravated with time due to climate change and variability as well as due to an increase in human-induced land use interventions that leads pressure on the river courses and change in river morphology. Therefore, the land use land cover and climate warming with erratic monsoon rainfalls resulted in significant variability in water availability, extremes and water storages; and highly irregular frequent of water extremes of different regions.

The proposed research aims to evaluate the water risk modeling and management under the influence of environmental changes; and to provide reliable and robust solutions for integrated aspects of hydrological extremes, environmental changes and socio-economic status management in Ethiopia. The proposed research also includes the following specific tasks: Improve understanding and identify the interaction in atmosphere-land processes; Understating changes and variability in hydrological extremes using the multi-model approach and hydrologic modeling framework; Flood extent (inundation), river flood depth , and river flood duration estimation using hydrodynamic model in the past and future period; Provide robust solution by combing of climate models, land use model, hydrological models and hydrodynamic models for integrated water extreme management; and establishing an interface of the water extreme scenarios with socio-economy and environment in order to generate water extreme vulnerability and risk in the basin scale.