The research group of the Environmental Intelligence for Global Change Lab of the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano, coordinated by Prof. Andrea Castelletti together with Prof. Matteo Giuliani, conducted a study in collaboration with colleagues from Tufts University, Cornell University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which shows how the adoption of coordinated global policies to mitigate climate change could reduce any harmful and unwanted impacts on the Water-Energy-Food nexus on a local scale.
The research, published in Nature Climate Change, analyses over 7,000 future scenarios that combine different projections of climate change, socio-economic and mitigation policies. The results show how actions aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions produced by land-use change, which provide for different taxation levels between developed and developing countries, could increase vulnerabilities in African basins.
In particular, it was discovered that these strategies tend to concentrate large agricultural expansion projects in African countries, where land-use change is not taxed. However, these trends generate twice the demand for water resources than the implementation of more coordinated and uniform emission reduction strategies on an international level, which thus would allow to tackle both the problem of climate change on a global scale and to reduce its impacts on a local scale, where the greatest irrigation demands decrease the amount of water available for hydroelectric uses or to guarantee ecosystem services, especially in river deltas.
The research highlighted the importance of combining global climate change mitigation policies with the assessment of these measures’ impact on the Water-Energy-Food nexus on a local scale. This allows to better analyse the entire spectrum of possible future scenarios and to support policy makers in defining priorities related to different mitigation and adaptation solutions to climate change, through a better exploration of synergies, conflicts and vulnerabilities in dynamics related to the Water-Energy-Food nexus. In particular, policy makers may need to look beyond their national borders to avoid outsourcing the use of water resources and to ensure environmental and climate justice for all.
This research is one of the main results of the European project DAFNE - Decision Analytic Framework to explore the water-energy-food Nexus in complex transboundary water resource systems of fast developing countries funded by the European program Horizon 2020, which promoted a participatory planning and management of water resources to identify sustainable development paths that address the Water-Energy-Food nexus of two African rivers: the Zambezi river basin and the Omo river/Turkana lake basin.
The Study
"Unintended consequences of climate change mitigation for African river basins"
Matteo Giuliani, Jonathan R. Lamontagne, Mohamad I. Hejazi, Patrick M. Reed & Andrea Castelletti
Nature Climate Change (2022)