2011 - World Bank - Assessment of Climate Change on Mountain Hydrology in Peru

Climate change is beginning to have effects on resource availability in ways that need to be anticipated when planning for the future. In particular, changes in rainfall patterns and temperature may impact the intensity or schedule of water availability, which could affect activities such as irrigation and energy production from hydropower plants. These changes have the potential to impact the energy and other sectors, such as agriculture, and could have broader economic e_x0002_ ects.

However, anticipating the impacts of climate change is a new frontier. There are few examples of predictions of the impact of climate change on resource availability and even fewer examples of the applications of such predictions to planning for sustainable economic development. Developing methodologies to assess the climate impacts and translating them into anticipated impacts on the energy, agricultural and other sectors will be increasingly important in the future as governments and the private sector aim to increase the resilience of their activities to the impacts of climate change.

This report presents a summary of the efforts of a Bank energy and climate change team to develop methodological tools for the assessment of climate impacts on surface hydrology in the Peruvian Andes. The importance of analyzing the potential climate impacts on hydrology in Peru arises in part from concerns about the retreat of tropical glaciers, the drying of unique Andean wetland ecosystems, as well as increased weather variability and weather extremes, all of which will affect water regulation. The study, together with a recently published report by the World Bank, Peru: Overcoming the Barriers to Hydropower, is intended to inform plans for energy development in Peru and enable the consideration of the consequences of climate change for such development.
While the report provides some insights into how hydrology may behave under future climate scenarios in Peru, the main purpose is to contribute to the methodological approaches to anticipate impacts from climate change in the Andes Region and other mountain ranges. Developing a methodology is a first step toward improving our ability to predict hydrological conditions in the future. In turn, these predictions could be
used to make planning more robust to uncertainty with respect to climate change impacts.

Ultimately, such insights could inform and enrich economic and energy planning, thereby permitting the integration of the consideration of climate change impacts into the planning process.