Integrated, Stakeholder-Driven, Regional Energy-Water-Land Planning in Latin America
Abstract
Regional energy, water, and land (EWL) resource planning has commonly been conducted in relative isolation by institutions focused on individual sectors (e.g., water resources planning, or electricity system planning), in both developed and developing economies. The effectiveness of this traditional planning paradigm is increasingly being strained by rapid integration among sectors; as well as by a range of regional and global forces, such as climate change, technological change, socioeconomic change, etc. An opportunity exists to enhance the traditional approach to national and regional EWL planning. The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region provides a rich context for exploring this opportunity, given its abundant but often unevenly distributed resources, strong connection to the global economy through agricultural trade, and potential for climate impacts across energy-water-land systems. This presentation will summarize key insights from three stakeholder-driven EWL planning studies in Colombia, Argentina, and Uruguay. These studies use a novel multi-model EWL accounting framework that couples EWL systems together at the regional level and connects them to national and global socioeconomic and climatic forces in an internally consistent, computationally efficient, and decision-relevant manner. Each study identifies EWL constraints and synergies relevant to infrastructure planning that warrant more detailed consideration. In particular, the studies reveal the unanticipated multi-sector planning consequences of complex interacting and conflicting policies and forces, such as regional irrigation initiatives, national climate policy, and climate change.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMGC32A..03W
- Keywords:
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- 0402 Agricultural systems;
- BIOGEOSCIENCES;
- 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGE;
- 1878 Water/energy interactions;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 6344 System operation and management;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES