Abstract
Responses to climate change in transboundary river basins are believed to depend on national and sub-national capacities as well as the ability of co-riparian nations to communicate, coordinate, and cooperate across their international boundaries. We develop the first framework for assessing transboundary adaptive capacity. The framework considers six dimensions of transboundary river basins that influence planning and implementation of adaptation measures and represents those dimensions using twelve measurable indicators. These indicators are used to assess transboundary adaptive capacity of 42 basins in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and Sahel. We then conduct a cluster analysis of those basins to delineate a typology that includes six categories of basins: High Capacity, Mediated Cooperation, Good Neighbour, Dependent Instability, Self-Sufficient, and Low Capacity. We find large variation in adaptive capacity across the study area; basins in Western Europe generally have higher capacities to address the potential hazards of climate change. Our basin typology points to how climate change adaptation policy interventions would be best targeted across the different categories of basins.
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Notes
For a map of transboundary river basins see the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database at http://www.transboundarywaters.orst.edu/database/interriverbasinreg.html
The term co-riparian is used in international relations to refer to nations that share water bodies.
By cooperative water management, we refer to the full spectrum of cooperation ranging from informal verbal exchanges to formal instances of joint water management as per the BAR scale described in Yoffe et al. (2003).
See footnote 1.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Aaron Wolf and Jennifer Veilleux with the Oregon State Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database for the GIS files used in this analysis; Itay Fischhendler with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for data on uncertainty mechanisms and data sharing; and Lucia De Stefano with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid for data on treaty resilience. We also thank Marisa Goulden and the CLICO internal reviewer who provided valuable feedback and suggestions. This research is part of the CLICO project on Climate Change, Hydro-Conflict, and Human Security. CLICO is carried out by 14 research institutes from Europe and the Middle East and is funded under the European Union Framework 7 Research Programme.
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Milman, A., Bunclark, L., Conway, D. et al. Assessment of institutional capacity to adapt to climate change in transboundary river basins. Climatic Change 121, 755–770 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0917-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0917-y