Adaptive Water Management

Climate Change will bring profound changes to local and global water management. Shifting weather patterns and rising sea levels will lead to more pronounced droughts in some areas and floods in others. Providing reliable water supplies to existing urban and rural environments will become increasingly difficult in the context of tighter linkages between water and energy.

Advanced decision-support capabilities are essential to manage Earth’s water resources and to reduce the effect of floods and droughts. PSI’s research & development capabilities will leverage integrated configurations of ground-, airborne- and satellite-based technologies to monitor the state of land, catchments, rivers, defenses and vulnerable areas in near-real time. This will allow us to build, for example, decision support systems to optimise water (re)allocation, reservoir and water transport management, hydropower systems, and for devising short-term crop planting strategies and precision farming in agriculture.

PSI will also deliver real time integration of models and information for improved early warning systems for floods and droughts to assess, for example, the reliability of flood infrastructure, to improve evacuation strategies, and develop model-driven management strategies to predict and minimize the impacts of flooding and drought.