Center for Climate Change and Transformation - Water and Human Systems
Water and Human Systems
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Climate change and human activities are rapidly affecting water availability and demand from mountains to low-lying areas. Shifts in timing and quantity of water resources can exacerbate the frequency and severity of flood and drought occurrences, impacting both natural and human systems. These challenges call for improvements in our understanding of the effects on water resources. A better comprehension of the processes driving current and future changes in the mountain water cycle and interactions with human systems is crucial for developing and testing effective strategies to adapt to future water-related risks.
The Water and Human Systems (WHS) research area advances the understanding of human impacts on water resources and vice versa from mountains to low-lying areas to assess water-related risks and impacts on the environment and societies.
Within CCT, WHS provides knowledge, expertise, data, quantitative and qualitative modelling frameworks on water-related processes and risks in mountain contexts, considering the Adige River Basin as the main lab to test and develop expertise transferable to other mountain areas of the world.
The activities are currently organized along two research lines: Socio-hydrology and Drought impacts.
- Developing conceptual socio-hydrological models to identify relations and feedback loops between human activities and water resources.
- Collecting data to increase our knowledge on water availability and demand from the main water users (e.g., energy, agriculture and ecosystems) for current and future climate scenarios and socio-cultural dynamics.
- Consolidating the used hydrological models to develop a multi-model pipeline able to refine the quantification of current and future water availability and demand.
Socio-hydrology
The main objective of this research line is to improve the understanding of dynamics and feedback loops between human systems and hydrological processes that lead to critical conditions and conflicts for water management.
Specifically, we aim at:
Contacts: Stefano Terzi (CCT), Giacomo Bertoldi (AlpEnv)
- Improving the existing collection of drought impacts data exploring unconventional data (for example, text-based newspaper articles)
- Providing public access to the collected impact dataset for further explorative activities
- Integrating the drought impact dataset in a hybrid data-driven drought modelling framework
- Testing the data collection, filtering and classification pipeline to the whole of Italy and other areas.
Drought impacts
The primary goal of this research line is to increase the knowledge of drought impacts across multiple sectors focusing on the Adige River basin, while testing methods for the Italian Alps and beyond.
We specifically aim at:
Contacts: Stefano Terzi (CCT), Piero Campalani (CCT), Jennifer-Carmen Frey (Linguistics)
