Lesotho WEAP Manual
This analysis looks specifically at the need to ensure continued development of water resources within Lesotho and aims to empower stakeholders to act with more confidence by demonstrating that the implementation strategies can provide benefits to...
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| Language: | English en_US |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2017
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/543441486622913509/Lesotho-WEAP-manual http://hdl.handle.net/10986/26026 |
| Summary: | This analysis looks specifically at the
need to ensure continued development of water resources
within Lesotho and aims to empower stakeholders to act with
more confidence by demonstrating that the implementation
strategies can provide benefits to water resources
management over a broad range of possible future scenarios.
The analysis quantifies a range of possible future
conditions to demonstrate the benefits that can be realized
over a broad range of possible future outcomes. This
quantification is based on a water resource decision support
model developed specifically for Lesotho, using the Water
Evaluation and Planning (WEAP) model which couples climate,
hydrologic, and water management systems to facilitate an
evaluation of the uncertainties and strategies of impacts on
specified management metrics. The WEAP model was used to
simulate the historic climate based on data from the
national government archives and global datasets available
in the public domain. These included 121 downscaled Global
Climate Model (GCM) projections of future climate over two
possible water demand future scenarios, for a total of 244
scenarios up to the year 2050. The analysis concludes the
following: (a)Climate change has important determinants for
the future, long-term sustainable macroeconomic development
of Lesotho: (b)Domestic and industrial water security is
highly vulnerable under historical and current climate
conditions, as well as under the full range of climate
future scenarios; (c) Agriculture production will remain
vulnerable to inter-annual variability over the coming
decades, particularly with continued reliance on rain fed
agriculture; and (d) The Lesotho Highlands Water Project
(LHWP) will continue to reliably meet transfers to South
Africa over the coming decades unless climate conditions are
about 5 percent drier or more than the historical record. |
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