About Water2Invest

In 2012 Utrecht University, Deltares, Imperial College, FutureWater and Carthago Consultancy joined forces with the aim to device a web-based tool to assess the efficiency (effectiveness and costs) of adaptation measures to bridge the future water gap under various scenarios of future climate and socio-economic change. The project was funded by Climate KIC. This website contains the web-based tool. The website was initially designed by Imperial College but finished by Berendrecht Consultancy with additional financial support from Utrecht University.

The web-baised tool thus developed is based on a method devised by FutureWater conducted for the MENA region for the World Bank (see the associated paper for part of the methodology).

The tool consists of two parts:

  1. A climate and water change explorer that allows one to globally view the current state of global temperature, precipitation, water supply and sectoral water demand and the changes therein under scenarios of climate and socio-economic change.
  2. An adaption investigation tool. With this tool a water province can be selected (a water province is the intersection of a hydrological basin and an administrative unit – province or country). For this water province, first the future water gap can be calculated under selected climate and socio-economic scenarios. Next, a set of possible water adaptation scenarios can be selected and evaluated to investigate whether these are sufficient to close the current and future water gap. The efficiency of the proposed measures (effectiveness and costs) are evaluated using a water marginal cost curve. Cost of measures ($/m3 water) are globally uniform, but can be adjusted separately for each water province.

The backbone of the calculations consists of the global hydrological model PCR-GLOBWB for water supply and the water demand and allocation model WATCAM for water use. The tool is not meant for the general public, but for students, experts and professionals in water science and management. For these users the tool should be rather intuitive and self-explanatory, while the HELP buttons contain additional explanations. A paper with background information has been published in Environmental Modelling and Software and can be found here.