Water insurance as climate change adaptation tool for optimization of water permits

• Ano de defesa: 2016
• Autor(a) principal: Mohor, Guilherme Samprogna
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Adaptação a mudanças climáticas; Climate change adaptation; Gerenciamento de recursos hídricos; Hydrologic insurance; Outorga de uso de água; Segurança hídrica; Seguros hídricos; Water resources management; Water security; Water use permit
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/18/18138/tde-23032017-102949/

Recent prolonged droughts make the urgent need to revise the criteria for water use permits in Brazil, especially in basins under conflicts for water use. Mechanisms for water risks transfer are an important adaptation tool. However, in Brazil, there is no established methodology that adapts this technique to assist the water use permit instrument. Moreover, there is no water risk insurance methodology with uncertainty analysis that complements its effectiveness in reducing losses from extreme events. Hydrologic modelling is the basis for development of these tools, which carries uncertainties that must be considered in decision-making. The objectives of this project were: i) coupling climatic, hydrologic and water insurance models to evaluate the use permit decision-making; ii) analyse sensitivity of performance indicators of a water risk insurance model through the application of different hydrologic models driven by climate change projections. The methodology was applied in donor basins of the Cantareira Water Supply System, which supplies water to an important metropolitan region that showed itself vulnerable to hydrologic extremes in the last years. The MHD-INPE and SWAT hydrologic models were applied, driven by the Eta- HadGEM2-ES climate model projections to characterize the future hydrologic regime in the region and also to compare the structure, performances and gaps of the models. Structural differences are most likely the greater responsible for the results differences, though no result could be identified as \"more certain\". With the hydrologic models outputs fitted the the Gumbel extreme values distribution, a proposed insurance fund simulator, MTRH-SHS, was run with 100 equiprobable scenarios of 50-year annual low-flow events to calculated an optimized premium capable of paying all indeminities of hydrologic drought. Besides the future hydrologic regimes, water demand scenarios were also tested. The optimized premiums were compared to the local GDP to assess the apparent affordability of the insurance, with some premium representing up to 0.54% of local GDP, but in the water resources management framework, the decision should be made collectively by several actors within the basin's committee.